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CONTENTS EDITION 1 - ARRIVE PAGE SEVEN: CAMPUS UPDATES by Courtney Withers
PAGE TWENTY-NINE: THE INTERNET ARRIVED. DID HUMOUR LEAVE? by George Samios
PAGE EIGHT: CAMPUS STORY by Courtney Withers and Anica Mancinone
PAGE THIRTY: CAN WE PLEASE LEAVE CANCEL CULTURE IN 2019?
PAGE NINE: A FRESHER’S GUIDE TO COFFEE ON CAMPUS
by Cameron Carr
by Cameron Carr
PAGE THIRTY-ONE: FAR FROM GRUNTLED: A SEMI-REGULAR COLUMN
PAGES TEN AND ELEVEN: YOU SAY YOU WANT A REVOLUTION?
by Rupert Williamson
by Lachlan Hardman
PAGE THIRTY-TWO: ODE TO JOI by Ben Nixon
PAGE TWELVE: INVASION / ARRIVAL by Elena Perse
PAGE THIRTY-THREE: INERTIA by Anna Kimpton
PAGE THIRTEEN: ODE TO LUNGS by Kieran Lynch
PAGES FOURTEEN AND FIFTEEN: SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT: FROM ANTIQUITY TO MODERNITY
PAGES THIRTY-FOUR AND THIRTY-FIVE: CAN YOU BUILD A CITY WITH LEGO AND A VR HEADSET? by Gary Iwansantoso
by John Fegebank
PAGE SIXTEEN: ARRIVING AT UNI AS A MATUREAGED STUDENT
PAGES THIRTY-SIX AND THIRTY-SEVEN: ARRIVAL OF THE TRUE SELF by Merlin Hoskins
by Tam Pinkerton
PAGE SEVENTEEN: ARRIVAL: A NEED FOR SKEPTICISM IN ECONOMICS
PAGE THIRTY-EIGHT: ARRIVALS: FIRST-YEAR, FIRST-CLASS ADVICE FROM A COMMERCE STUDENT
by Charles Fedor
by Millie Muroi
PAGES EIGHTEEN AND NINETEEN: BEYOND SPACE JUNK: WHAT METEORITES CAN TELL US
by Campbell Williamson
PAGE THIRTY-NINE: KATH & KIM & THE CASTLE
by Jack Logan
PAGE TWENTY: THE ARRIVAL OF THE DEEPFAKE by Caleb Cheng
PAGES FORTY AND FORTY-ONE: ENCOUNTERS AND PERSPECTIVES: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARCHITECT EMILY VAN EYK by Riva-Jean Lander
PAGE TWENTY-ONE: CAMERA OBSCURA by Charles Yan Pan Ng
PAGES TWENTY-TWO AND TWENTY-THREE: CROSSING BORDERS WITH MONFLOY
PAGES FORTY-TWO AND FORTY-THREE: CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK IS THE MORRISON GOVERNMENT’S NEXT TEST by Miachela Tam
by Ella Fox-Martens
PAGE FORTY-FOUR: YOU_ARRIVE PAGES TWENTY-FOUR AND TWENTY-FIVE: BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ARTS?
by Ellie Fisher
by Abigail Macleod
by Isabelle Yuen
PAGE TWENTY-SIX: PHOTOGRAPHY
PAGE FORTY-FIVE: AN INTERVIEW WITH GUILD PRESIDENT BRE SHANAHAN
by Tony Li
A NEW DAY
by Cameron Carr
PAGE TWENTY-SEVEN: ILLUSTRATION
PAGE TWENTY-EIGHT: PHOTOGRAPHY
PAGE FORTY-SIX AND FORTY SEVEN: SUPERMAN RETURNS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF RETURNING
by Ei Win
by Mikey Isitt
by Pauline Wong
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CONTRIBUTORS EDITION 1 - ARRIVE
4
Abigail Macleod
Abigail commentates her drive to work as if she's first in the Formula 1.
Anica Mancinone
Anica is a third year Arts student who can quote The Godfather, alongside niche facts about the Mafia.
Anna Kimpton
Anna spends her time accumulating memes and writing sad poetry.
Ben Nixon
Ben Nixon will pursue a PhD to prove that Rise of Skywalker is a masterpiece.
Caleb Cheng
Caleb is a 2nd year student who is fascinated by the bleeding edge.
Cameron Carr
Cameron thinks pay and go parking is terrible also he’s a pisces.
Campbell Williamson
Campbell Williamson thinks that more people should bring lunch from home.
Chalres Y. P. Ng
Charles is a Chinese Canadian architecture student who is based in Perth and Melbourne.
Charles Fedor
Charles changed to a Commerce major upon realising the employment prospects of Politics.
Courtney Withers
Courtney is a third year Journalism and Theatre student and would describe herself as a Gina Linetti stan.
Elena Perse
Elena cares deeply (possibly too much) about the correct placement of apostrophes.
Ella Fox-Martens
Ella Fox-Martens is a student and writer. She is a big fan of hot chocolate.
Ellie Fisher
Ellie has a passion for the works of Sylvia Plath, with whom she shares her birthday.
Gary Iwansantoso
Gary studies Civil Engineering (MPE) with a passion for tech and creative arts.
George Samios
If George doesn’t leave Perth, he’ll remain on campus.
Isabelle Yuen
Isabelle loves to stare blankly at empty word documents and call it writing.
Jack Logan
Jack’s still waiting for a meteorite to wipe out all life on this dumb planet.
John Fegebank
The only thing stronger than John’s love for physics is his caffeine addiction.
Kieran Lynch
Kieran Lynch’s major goal in life is to win the Eurovision Song Contest.
Lachlan Hardman
Lachlan eats, sleeps, watches TV, and will sometimes write for Pelican Magazine.
Merlin Hoskins
Merlin can usually be found sleeping in one of the dumpsters behind the tavern.
Michaela Tam
Michaela studies Business Law and Accounting, loves to read the news and binge-watch TV shows.
Mikey Isitt
Mikey Isitt is going round, taking names.
Millie Muroi
Millie is an Arts student camouflaged by an enthusiasm for economics.
Riva-Jean Lander
Riva-Jean Lander studies architecture, and has a bachelor’s degree in anthropology and sociology.
Rupert Williamson
Rupert wants the Oceanographic Institute to know he respects and fears the ocean.
Tam Pinkerton
Science Communicator and wanna-be-botanist, Tam can keep small humans and sometimes plants alive.
Tony Li
Tony will attempt to mathematicise everything he sees, to a ridiculous end.
Hnin Ei Kyaw Win
Ei is here is waste my time and money for a degree and hopes you enjoy her photos.
Pauline Wong
Pauline isn’t good at describing herself but enjoys drawing for Pelican.
Xander
Literally put his back out designing this layout.
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ARRIVE PRESITORIAL BAYLITORIAL STIRLITORIAL
Hello! I’m Bre, your Guild President. The Guild is here to be your voice on campus, through reports, meetings, motions, emails and everything in between. We also do a lot of fun stuff to make your student life the best it can be. You’re lucky because you’ve arrived at a place consistently ranked as the ‘Best University in Australia’ for campus culture. With over 150 clubs as well as Guild Departments, volunteering, sport, college life, and Pelican, there’s always something to get involved in. Take a moment to think about the journey, not just the destination, and go from there. Sometimes the journey through uni can be a little tricky. Whether you need a chat, or you’re looking for free, independent and confidential finance or academic advice, the Guild is here for you. Look after yourselves and make sure you pop
in to say hi!
I’ve spent the last four months in England, and I’m required by law to mention that fact once every five minutes. Although when I bring it up, I tend to say that I spent four months in ‘Europe’ instead. The word ‘Europe’ conjures up images of sunsets by the beach, drinking expensive red wine and mispronouncing historical sights. Instead I spent my time sitting in a student pub, listening to my friends discuss Brexit while a white guy sings Redbone for karaoke, not realising that the n-word pops up in the chorus until it’s too late. I’d also be lying if I said that was the only time I witnessed something like that in England. But now I’ve arrived back in Australia, I feel like England has something the rest of Europe doesn’t have. They have hope.
107th Guild President
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Sophie Minissale (@sophieminissale), 2019 Editor and photographerextraordinaire, shot this image of Elizabeth Quay station. Trains are a generic symbol of coming and going, but Sophie has made this shot specific to UWA students by capturing a place most of you will have visited on your journey today. Through visual effects, she’s also captured the ephemerality of the train and waiting passenger, highlighting the nature of arrivals; static moments that are passages
Just kidding, British people don’t have hope. They traded it for
of time.
Stonehenge.
Stirling
Bayley
Bre Shanahan
As an art history student – and now Editor of Pelican – the prospect of choosing cover art for every print edition gets me hot. Bayley and I are planning to specially commission every piece of cover art, specific to our (let’s be honest – mostly my) tastes. Rather than my editorials being poetic and personal analyses of the theme, I’d rather chat about the cover art we so carefully curate.
CAMPUS UPDATES BY COURTNEY WITHERS
It’s time for a much-needed update for 2020. Just imagine I’m reading the news ‘Rick and Sue Channel 7-style’, instead of typing away on my pesky laptop. What does it mean to arrive? Well, arriving on campus seems like a good place to start (unless you’ve got another 8.30am lecture, then you’re excused). But in all seriousness, arriving back on campus after a much-needed break can be a tad daunting. There are dates to remember and timetables to sort, I mean I’ve probably missed the class signup already as I’m writing this. That post-holiday funk can be difficult to get out of, and even worse when you’ve got a million dates and times to remember. Your diary has scribbles over multiple days that you can’t quite make out; you’ve got a pile of books in your room that you were supposed to have read by the first lecture; and you haven’t done your annual trip to Officeworks to buy some expensive pens that you most certainly won’t end up using. Sound familiar? But it’s time to board that ship and wave goodbye to that sweet, sweet holiday that was. RIP Summer of 2019/20, you will be missed. Say hello to multiple alarms being set in increments of five minutes and that rush out the door with a piece of spread-less toast in hand.
Arriving on campus in 2020… Here’s what you need to know: •
Week 1 starts: 24th February
•
Club Carnival: Tuesday, 3rd March
•
Last day to add a unit: 29th February
•
Last day to withdraw early: 15th March
•
Last date to withdraw without academic consequence: 10th April
•
Last day to purchase Semester 1 parking permit: 24th April
•
Census date (last date to pull out of a unit without being charged for it): 31st March
•
Study week begins: 13th April
•
Semester 1 ends: 22nd May
I salute your bravery with your arrival back to uni this semester, and wish you all the best with finding parking; not spending too much time in The Tav; drinking less coffee; not falling asleep in lectures; and trying not to buy your lunch every day to save money, because God knows I need some help with that.
It’s time to dock at the jetty and arrive back at uni to get things moving, whether you like it or not. So lay out that first day outfit; get the perfect ‘uni bag’ ready; and get out that fresh A4, lined notebook, because it’s time to return to campus. But what’s that? You’d like some campus news to accompany your arrival back to uni this semester? Well say no more, because that I can provide!
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A PORTRAIT OF THE FRESHER YOU THOUGHT YOU WEREN’T Courtney Withers: With a new year and new decade brings us a new tradition here at Pelican. Every print edition this year, you’ll be hearing from a fellow student, who will share their very own campus story! Yes, that’s right. You’re looking at the very first ‘Campus Story’ for 2020. Our first story is brought to you by Anica Mancinone, who tells the tale of her first arrival to UWA and the antics that followed. Here’s Anica.
Freshly shed from the obnoxious leavers jacket that had adorned me like a second skin and fixing my stare with that unmistakeable fresher daze, I arrived and joined the hordes of them.
and curiosity. It might shock the system, or settle in a subtle, niggling way. Every fresher, at the end of their first year, will reflect on the simultaneous enormity and normality of it all.
The tentative, somewhat frantic pack of first years you can never miss in those early days of March, eagerly laden with new backpacks, satchels, Keep Cups and sticky notes they’ll likely never use.
For me, this was two years ago; half a degree, an exchange trip abroad, and a couple of uni clubs later. Has my naivety evolved from how it was when I was just seventeen years old?
The first semester was a test of adaptation to the ‘cruisier’ university lifestyle, but also to the lack of a parental hand gripping, guiding me around tight corners. I faced all the classic dilemmas; constantly consulting passing strangers and the ‘Lost On Campus’ app for lecture room locations; bemoaning the occasional trek to the business school and back; chewing into my savings with SmartRider fees; and suffering some unjustified anxiety from emailing professors for the first time.
I know where the SSCI rooms are and have consolidated my favourite coffee locations on campus; know the peak times to snag a window seat in the library; can throw together a bibliography in the minutes before submission; and mumble some words of German and Italian, resulting from indecisiveness and eclectic interests when it comes to broadening units.
How do I even sign off on an email? Do I refer to them by their first name? Why has it been two weeks and they haven’t replied? A one-word response — do they hate me?! There were the more unconventional encounters too; walking into my first lecture and being welcomed by the professor serenading us “Hello” by Adele for no apparent reason, or the very awkward moment when a student flipped out on a tutor and stormed dramatically out of the room. One only has to look so far as the ‘Confessions at UWA’ Facebook page to explore the endlessly rich and amusing anecdotes of campus life, which many a naive fresher has yet to witness. The first year is confronting, tame, wild, and completely mundane; a conglomeration of nerves
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But in all honesty, this campus keeps surprising me in new ways. I may have arrived, all brand new and shiny, two years ago, but the journey hasn’t settled. In many ways I’ve only become more unmoored, happily directionless at times, as my interests evolve and exciting people come into my life. That’s the thing about arriving; the people and ideas you meet along the way make the destination worth it. You can smile smugly to yourself as the group of frazzled freshers pass you by outside Reid at the start of this semester, but you may see your own face among them; all deer in the headlights, faking it ‘til you make it, wagging tongues out the car window, forever arriving to new places. If you want to be featured as the next ‘Campus Story’, email your submission for the next print edition to pelican@guild.uwa.edu.au.
A FRESHER’S GUIDE TO COFFEE ON CAMPUS BY CAMERON CARR
Do you actually drink coffee?
No
Yes
The most important thing for me is affordability
I don’t mind paying for drinks
No
No
Yes
I’ll go off campus for good coffee
I like bubbles in my drinks
Water fountain
No
Boost Juice
Hackett Café / Rocket Fuel
No
Yes
Quobba Gnarning / Catalyst Café
7/11 Subi
Yes
I would prefer
I like to get close to the libraries
Utopia
No
Yes
Yes
somewhere scenic
No
Tenth State
Yes
Bayside Kitchen
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YOU SAY YOU WANT A
REVOLUTION? BY LACHLAN HARDMAN
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Despite a decade of scientific consensus, years of warnings, international agreements to curb greenhouse gas emissions and continual developments in technology, meaningful action on climate change has been delayed. Politicians have wasted time in Parliament debating whether human activities are actually to blame; agreements are sidestepped in the name of short-term economic growth, with the interests of the fossil fuel industry prioritised over those of the planet.
of people prophesying doom and gloom, shouting that ‘our house is on fire’ when everything seems to be going just fine. What’s more, there have also been other issues to address: climate action has had to contend with terrorism, a global financial crisis, falling housing prices, glamorous royal weddings and enthralling reality TV finales. With consequences seemingly so far away, climate change is an issue which is alarmingly easy to dismiss.
The overwhelming institutional inertia to address climate change is not only perpetuated by fossil fuel monoliths trying to protect their profits, or politicians in the pursuit of electoral success. Swathes of the media have also been raucously dismissive, if not outright hostile, towards the climate crisis movement. The criticism by prominent personalities, from Craig Kelly to Alan Jones, reflect the sentiments from a segment of the population which views the issue with an unassailable disdain. Activists are attacked as ‘indoctrinated doomsayers’, who are too young to know what they are talking about.
Moreover, the actions that would be needed to address the problem are so overwhelmingly enormous, with implications so far-ranging, that nobody can really be fully certain as to what they might lead to or entail. Beyond simply asking ourselves whether we believe in the science, it involves potentially examining the very economic, political and social systems that underpin our society. We’re told we face human extinction if we don’t stop driving our cars, eating meat, or burn the fossil fuels that have literally built and run the modern society we live in today—The task becomes so huge that it is basically unthinkable.
Perhaps some of this resistance comes from one’s natural scepticism; you don’t blindly trust a group
However, things are slowly beginning to change. Around the world, people are engaging in school
strikes, university walkouts, and demonstrations calling for urgent action to be taken. Groups like Extinction Rebellion have become household names. A sixteen-year-old climate activist was TIME’s person of the year. The simplicity of ignorance is beginning to melt away; the recent bushfires in Australia mark an arrival into a new reality—a reality where climate change isn’t a topic reserved for compelling documentaries and PowerPoint slides, or Getty images of polar bears perched on extremely small icebergs. Instead, it’s a reality where Miami is submerged under a metre of water; where people are being evacuated from Tuvalu because soon the island will no longer exist; it’s an area the size of Belgium burning in eastern Australia while one billion native animals are incinerated. It’s much harder to look out the window and say everything’s alright when your house is actually on fire. There’s a real mobilised passion in the air. In Perth and around the country, tens of thousands of people, young and old, have been turning up for protests calling for greater action on climate change, the abolition of government fossil fuel subsidies and the resignation of Prime Minister Scott Morrison. The country has been flooded with donations towards the bushfire effort. Jennifer Aniston and Leonardo DiCaprio are warning about the climate crisis. Even Waleed Aly is getting in on the action! Metal straws and plastic keep cups are more popular than ever; it seems like everyone’s going ‘vego’. These things undoubtedly have their benefits. Going waste-free, using minimal plastic or eating less meat can only benefit the environment. Donations will provide immeasurable assistance to those directly by the fires. It’s also true that the current Prime Minister has shown extremely poor leadership. But there is a risk in the ease in which we can channel impassioned intentions towards one person or purchase a symbolic gesture of change, when action on climate change is a far more systemic issue.
Modifying our consumer habits, sharing a viral hashtag, giving a kind donation or even going to a protest may feel good, and probably will do some good. However, it is important to recognise that this cannot come at the expense of discussion surrounding the need for real ‘institutional’ change— change that involves interrogating the underlying societal structures that are allowing the climate crisis to continue. Among other things, this might mean conceding that there are limits to the idea of endless, disposable consumption—that every generation should get more, have more than the last. It might mean choosing to no longer see ourselves as domineers over the natural environment, but instead as stakeholders in a complex global ecosystem that we both have an impact on, and are impacted by. It might mean designing more liveable cities, having conversations about education, culture, and the impact of reality TV. It might mean holding large corporations to greater accountability, working to reduce disenchantment and apathy in our democracy, and restoring trust in our politicians. It might also mean realising that it’s probably already too late to avert a climate crisis. Even if we completely restructured our economy to become 100% sustainable tomorrow, scientists project that we will still face decades of inevitable warming. We might need to increase our focus on adapting to the irrevocable climatic changes that are already beginning to affect us. These discussions aren’t fashionable. You can’t wear them like op-shop clothes. Nor is there likely to be one easy and simple answer. Figures in positions of wealth and power don’t want to engage with them because, understandably, they have the most to lose. But now that climate change has arrived, and the country is on fire, and we are at a crossroads for real change, perhaps they are necessary.
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ARRIVAL / INVASION BY ELENA PERSE
Their arrival marks the beginning of the end. The end of an era, the end of peace, the beginning of the worst. A group of foreigners who wanted to make the land their own, who pretended it was never anything but their own fortuitous discovery. Never mind the people already there. Those pale strangers left scars that this land and its people still suffer. Wounds that are reopened so often that they never get the chance to heal. Will they ever? Each generation, a new horror. Each horror seemingly forgotten for the sake of one day when we are all Australian. We are all one, apparently, and we should stick together. But each and every year this solidarity dissipates along with the firework smoke. And still people drink and delight on a day of sorrow. The arrival of these strangers stands for more than just white feet on a new shore. It stands for death and destruction, dispossession and denigration. Families fragmented, a country missing so many of its inhabitants. Whatever can ever be thought to be gained by this arrival is outweighed a hundred times by what was lost. Culture and knowledge, family and country, language and stories – so much gone that we must acknowledge. A proud people held down, still suffering today. Consequences of greed and hate, of the actions on this day reverberate through the centuries. Living victims of this arrival walk among us. We deny their past, their present. The voices that matter most are continually ignored, leaders of today and tomorrow. Instead, we celebrate long dead murderers. The oldest living culture in the world exists on our land, but yet this country wishes to commemorate those who tried to keep them down. Survival in spite of invasion, persistence despite discrimination. Surely, this instead is what we should recognise. Responsibility must be taken, and changes must be made. This arrival was not the beginning of this land’s history, nor will it ever be. It is one moment in out of thousands upon thousands of years. It marks the beginning of discrimination, terror, racism and genocide. Who must we be as a country when we choose such a day to mark what it means to be Australian?
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The actions of the past cannot be taken back. Some wrongs cut far too deep to ever be righted. We must change today. Change all the days yet to come. We can never be equal, how can we truly be proud as long as we continue to honour the day that such trauma arrived on our shores? Colonisation is the bloody blindfold that hides white Australia’s black history. And yet we still celebrate, not an arrival, but an invasion.
Arrivals in popular music come in many forms. Some artists beat at a modest drum, hoping to catch an eye, while some put a sledgehammer to the bass drum and create a huge (but fleeting) crash. There are some who are handed a speaker that releases a perfectly predictable sampling of the Berlin Philharmonic’s best rhythms. A debut album can say a lot about an artist. I want to talk about the one that I think is the best I’ve heard- a record from an artist who didn’t just strike a drum, but who stamped the floor and pounded the walls too. Florence and the Machine’s debut album Lungs celebrated its ten-year anniversary just recently, prompting me to evaluate the impact it had on my world. It is a gloriously visceral record. Each track feels like a crescendo towards a point of maximum emotional intensity. Lyrically, Lungs has a penchant for melodrama, but Florence Welch’s strident vocals, roaring above the din, lend a charming authenticity to her words.
ODE TO LUNGS BY KIERAN LYNCH
But why should this visceral talent be so prized? Plenty of musicians could claim that same emotion, yet only a few can lay claim to the sense of grandeur and theatricality that this album possesses; its ability to arrest the ear and force you to enter its world. Tracks like Cosmic Love and Blinding feel designed to transport the listener to another plane of reality, heaving along with Florence’s voice amidst pounding drums and swirling harps. But these fantastical feats of escapism never manage to lose the sense of reality that inspires them. Take the idea in Drumming Song- that the heart could pound hard enough to be heard by one’s lover. It’s hardly original, but set to a relentless battery of percussion and piano, it becomes uncomfortably real. Or Between Two Lungs, where rising basslines and sleigh bells accompany the strangest account of a kiss in modern pop music, elevating the listener off the ground with its off-kilter charm. I dare anybody who’s listened to Dog Days Are Over to deny that they didn’t feel like stamping their feet in time to its bridge. In a subjective field like musical taste, what we ascribe value to is almost purely based on choice. Perhaps it’s that quality which made this album’s arrival in my life a decade ago so significant. At a time where I was just beginning to exert control over what I listened to, I’d never heard art that could take what I was feeling and elevate it to the stratosphere, where the most extravagant and outlandish emotional outbursts were effortless. Those glorious heights are still what I seek out in music to this day. Those were the aesthetic ideals that I decided to make part of my identity. And so I chose Lungs.
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SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT:
FROM ANTIQUITY TO MODERNITY BY JOHN FEGEBANK
Throughout our history, humanity has always shown a unique curiosity at the inner workings of the world. It has driven us to try to understand and explore how nature works, leading to the development of one of the most successful and beneficial schools of thought known to us – the scientific method. In the time of more ancient cultures, our perception of the world was driven more by superstition than evidence. The ancient Chinese, for example, viewed comets as bad omens, prompting emperors to hire astrologers for their prophecies. They were not the only ones to buy into such ideas as divination and prophecy; many other cultures believed the stars told of things to come. In fact, the twelve zodiac signs we see today – which some still believe define how humans behave – have their roots in the ancient Greek and Middle Eastern world.
This all leads us to wonder, how did we get from the point where superstition ruled, to our current understanding of scientific principals? To answer that, we must look again to the Ancient Greeks. To comprehend how they shaped our current understanding of the world, we must first look back to the natural philosopher Thales of Miletus, a prominent figure from the 6th to 5th centuries BCE. It was he who first postulated that the world is not ruled by the supernatural, but rather by logical cause-and-effect relationships. Dubbed the ‘father of science’, his school of thought shaped the core of natural philosophy – that any natural phenomena could be explained by pure logical deduction. It was not perfect by any measure, for human logic is not infallible, but it was a significant improvement. The impact of such ideological change can be seen from several conclusions drawn by various philosophers of the time. For instance, Pythagoras thought that mathematical ideas shaped the physical world; he postulated that since a sphere is a perfect 3D shape, the Earth must therefore be a sphere, thus predicting the shape of the Earth long before the age of space exploration. As history continued, and the Greeks’ knowledge was lost to the Western world, the texts that remained were kept by the kingdoms of the Middle East from as early as the 7th century. They assimilated these texts with those from other ancient empires, such as China and Egypt, and expanded on them, thus ushering in a period known as the Islamic Golden Age. It was during this time that Ibn Al-Haytham, a key thinker of the 11th to 10th centuries, began developing the scientific method as we know it today. His value of empiricism, the idea that any hypothesis must be supported by experimental evidence, gave him a keen insight into the concept of the scientific method five centuries before the Renaissance thinkers of the Western world began to consider the value of science, making him perhaps the first true scientist in human history. During this time of Islamic prosperity, the Western world had stagnated in their knowledge. However,
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as international trade became more prominent, the European and Arabic worlds began to exchange texts of antiquity as well as their own works. The advent of the printing press in 1450 boosted the spread of this new information. It was this resurgence of interest in antiquity and spread of new knowledge that began a period we now refer to as the Renaissance. It was not long before faith and science began to conflict. For centuries, the Catholic Church’s dogma had allowed it to maintain its power in Europe, but with new information becoming more available, and the curiosity of Western scholars driving them to become more inquisitive, the ‘truth’ that the Church fought to perpetuate came into question. This became more obvious during the Copernican Revolution. The Catholic Church asserted that because humans were God’s most beloved beings and put on his most beloved planet, then the entire universe, and by extension the solar system, should revolve around Earth. This was an idea known as Geocentrism. 15th to 16th century polymath named Nicolaus Copernicus, however, did significant work on a counter-model – Heliocentrism – arguing that the sun is the centre of the solar system. A century later, the physicist Galileo Galilei further fought
for these Heliocentric ideals. But his championing of this model led him to conflict with the church; a well-known pioneer into scientific thought and scepticism, he actively protested against geocentrism. He even openly mocked the Church on several occasions while campaigning for empirical evidence over faith. In 1633, he was found guilty of heresy by the Inquisition, put under house arrest indefinitely, and his writing was banned by the Church. Despite more evidence emerging out in support of Heliocentrism, Galileo remained under house arrest until his death. This story is not a unique one, but it does outline the nature of science. A scientist’s job is not to appease the convictions of society, but rather to challenge them with new evidence found while analysing nature. Any belief, in the eyes of the scientific method, is only as good as the evidence it stands on. And when that evidence does not hold up, we should discard that belief if we truly wish to understand our world. As history has shown us, we can only achieve such understanding through open collaboration and intellectual exchange between humanity. For only together can we successfully explore humanity’s innate curiosity.
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ARRIVING AT UNI AS A MATURE AGE STUDENT BY TAM PINKERTON
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Are you being called ‘mature’? Before you say ‘steady on’ - if you’re arriving at UWA with 20 years or more under your belt, then congratulations, you are a mature age student. Whether it has been three or thirty years since you last studied, your uni experience will be different compared to those who completed the WACE last year. Thankfully, there are no maturity requirements involved.
I’ve been here a while now, studying part-time whilst working and parenting, so have put together my top four tips to keep in mind as a mature-ager arriving on campus. I hope at least one comes in handy for you!
•
Preparing ahead: The ability to read unit outlines at the start of semester is a secret superpower. Do not underestimate this gift. It will give you a HUGE advantage in every unit you study, as you will understand what is required. It will surprise you how many other students don’t know to do this, or if they do, just don’t use it. If you come across these folks, be helpful!
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Asking for help: Nike said it best: “just do it.” There are so many services and amazing people here on campus to help you through whatever obstacles or curveballs life throws at you while you’re studying. The best piece of advice I picked up at my Mature Age Student orientation was that coming back to uni is like a marathon, not a sprint; pace yourself, and make sure you keep going.
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Draw on your experiences: Like running a business or childbirth, there are some things you might want to keep to yourself. Unless someone asks you, they probably don’t want to know. Instead, keep all those fabulous stories in your creative toolkit, ready for assignment work. Your experiences are a huge advantage if you use them the right way!
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Meet fellow mature-agers: You are on the road less travelled. Make the effort to meet and talk with other Mature Age Students. The reality is that most of the students at UWA are school leavers and outside uni, there will be very few people you meet going back to uni who understand the additional challenges of incorporating study into their already busy lives. The Guild have a Mature Age Student Association (MASA); drop in and say hi to someone at one of their catch ups (which are free). Chances are, I’ll probably be at one of them, and like most mature age students, I’m just full of random facts, golden nuggets of wisdom, and bizarre stories I love to share. But only if you ask!
Well, it’s a new year - the Earth has revolved around the Sun, and we can now usher in the 2020s. As new students arrive ready to change the world, our tutorials become ideological battlegrounds where we hash out ideas and discuss differing approaches to global challenges. In the humanities, ideological divergence is welcomed and a regular feature of tutorials. This means a harsh examination of our preconceptions and logic in the incandescent glare of fifteen strangers who you are pretty sure will disagree with you. Walk the dreaded fifteen minutes to the Business School, and you will see an entirely different world, where there is realistically only one ‘right’ answer regardless of your ideological bend. This works well for accounting or finance majors, whose job is primarily working within prescribed mathematical structures. It would not be acceptable for a bank to provide you eight answers regarding your monthly mortgage payment. However, this mathematical orthodoxy has infected the economics major.
ARRIVAL:
A NEED FOR SCEPTICISM IN ECONOMICS Remember, the best economists are posted to the civil service, and directly inform the decisions that politicians make. As my economics teacher once said, “you will struggle to pick any part of your life that has not been directly influenced by an economist or the policies they make”. Economists have a frightening amount of power, yet are not subjected to the same level of scrutiny as a politics major. Every politics major will tell you their ideological bend or the school of thought they subscribe to, which they are then are forced to defend in tutorials. I have gone through an economics degree never once being forced to reflect on or defend the underlying assumptions of my discipline. This is a dangerous path for any undergraduate, being essentially raised within an echo-chamber. Remember, economists are the ones who propose, analyse, and discuss political policies, such as raising the Newstart allowance, or providing a tax break. These are subjective valuations on people, places, and products that are exposed to the economist’s best judgement. What is quite Orwellian, however, is that economists treat these discussions like they are objective, with only one ‘right’ answer. This
has led to economic tutorials engaging in ‘groupthink’, with very little disagreement on an ideological or moral level, but rather on the number we put into a supply and demand formula. My exposure at UWA has taught me that a degree imbued with such power is inevitably interpreted as always presenting the ‘right’ answer. Trying to discuss alternative thinkers like Karl Marx or Malthus will usually be met with indignation, and the occasional sigh. As we get back into the swing of things, and the campus is once again engulfed with the classic “Is the Arts better than Commerce?” debate, it is critical for us to realise that economists should take a leaf out of the Arts School’s book, and challenge their tutors on underlying assumptions that inform the discipline. If we, as students, don’t collectively reject the orthodoxy of economics at UWA, what you will find is another cohort of graduates who will walk into a crisis thinking they have the ‘right’ answer, incapable of creative solutions. Dear reader, remember that “Orthodoxy means not thinking, not needing to think. Orthodox is unconsciousness.”
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BEYOND SPACE JUNK: WHAT METEORITES CAN TELL US BY JACK LOGAN
What awaits us in outer space? What lessons can we learn from the cosmos? How did our galaxy form, and where is it going? Such questions have been the driving-force behind astrological study since its inception. Lonely as we humans are in this incomprehensibly large and mostly empty universe, it feels like we have not even scratched the surface of understanding the cosmos beyond our own planet. While we have sent out probes and satellites to trawl the great unknown for decades, occasionally something comes hurtling in at us. Asteroids litter our solar system like common junk, and meteors streak across the night sky on a regular basis, but the landing of a meteorite on our doorstep is a relatively rare event. This debris, scorched and fragmented as it may be, is no mere space junk; just as the study of rock formations on Earth can clue us in on the evolution and origins of our planet, so too can the study of meteorites inform us about the path our stars, galaxy, and universe are taking. Australia is tantalisingly close to the forefront of this exciting field; in fact, one of the most promising discoveries in this field was found in 1969 in Murchison, just outside Melbourne. The Murchison Meteorite is one of the most studied extra-terrestrial objects on the planet due to both its relatively large size (over 100kg) and the fact that its fall was witnessed by dozens. This meteorite was recently thrust into the spotlight again when researchers at the University of San Diego discovered that it contains presolar grains – interstellar material that predates the formation of Earth’s sun. Presolar grains are an extreme rarity, only found in about five percent of meteorites on Earth. These tiny fragments of stardust are residual material from the deaths of stars, with the meteorite acting as a cosmic time capsule. Studying them can reveal information about both the creation of new atomic material, the life cycles of stars, and the composition of celestial objects in our wider galaxy.
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The presolar grains from the Murchison meteorite (silicon carbide particles, in this case) were found to be the oldest material found on Earth to date, and at approximately seven billion years old, they are about two-and-a-half billion years older than the Earth and our solar system. The difficulty of dating presolar grains is that it cannot be done using conventional methods, such as direct astronomical analysis or by studying the decay of radioactive particles. Instead, the samples are dated by studying the presence of neon isotopes produced by galactic cosmic rays in individual presolar grains. The longer the presolar grains are exposed to these rays, the more of these isotopes are formed. While this method, by the researchers’ own admission, provides ages only in relation to the birth of our solar system and suffers from relatively large uncertainties, it can provide unique information about the interstellar dust cycle and star-forming events in our galaxy. While some scientists hypothesise that the rate of our galaxy’s star formation is constant, these presolar grains provide direct evidence of a period of enhanced star formation in our galaxy seven billion years ago, predating the formation of our sun by at least two billion years. It is worth noting that given the sheer size of the universe and the age of celestial objects, most astronomical ‘dates’ are approximated on huge timescales and have considerable margins of error. Understanding the science behind the evolution of stars and the structure of our galaxy is challenging, in part due to the difficulty of conclusively discriminating between significant trends across the universe and simple correlations.
The idea of meteorites as cosmic debris was first posited by 18th century German physicist Ernst Chladni and popularised after the discovery of the first asteroid, Ceres, in 1801. In 1864, the subject attracted further attention when a meteorite fell near the French town of Orgueil, and seemed to contain material resembling local soil. This meteorite was later found to be nearly identical in composition to our sun, indicating the possibility of solar systems much like our own elsewhere in the galaxy. The arrival of carbon-rich extra-terrestrial material, such as the Orgueil and Murchison Meteorites, indicated the possibility of organic life beyond Earth. This possibility was given further weight by the presence of at least 15 different amino acids – the basic components of organic life – in the Murchison Meteorite alone. Is it possible that the material comprising you and could be found elsewhere in the universe, or even that life arrived on Earth from outside? While much of the history of astrological discovery is in Europe, and meteors themselves are of even more distant origin, local opportunities in this field abound. Perth’s own International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research (ICRAR), established as a joint venture between UWA and Curtin University, is conducting cutting-edge research into stellar evolution and galactic structure, piecing together the secrets to the universe’s past, present, and future. Astrophysics is a nascent field of study that is often frustrated by the inconvenient reality that the universe is larger than anything our human minds can ever hope to comprehend, but through sheer force of human curiosity, we can gradually peel back the layers of the great unknown.
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THE ARRIVAL OF THE DEEPFAKE BY CALEB CHENG
The sudden arrival of the deepfake offers a glimpse into the future of digital (mis)information.
Deepfakes began in 2017, when an anonymous Reddit user uploaded a series of doctored porn clips that replaced the face of an adult performer with various female celebrities. Now, two years later, the vast majority of Deepfakes (96%, according to AI firm Deeptrace) are still pornographic – admittedly much more realistic. However, the same technology that enables such forgeries could be manipulated to influence worldwide elections and undermine an already decaying trust in the media.
infamous conversation: “I don’t even wait… You can do anything… Grab them by the p*ssy.” If this audio had surfaced today, or in a few presidential terms from now, could Trump simply have tweeted “Another HOAX DEEPFAKE from the DEMOCRATS! I did nothing wrong! #fakenews,” completely dismissing the veracity of the video? The more common deepfakes become, the more corruption can be plausibly denied no matter how damning the evidence may be.
In order to generate a convincing deepfake, thousands of images are collected of the targets’ face - celebrities and politicians being especially vulnerable due to their massive online presence. These images are run through an AI called an ‘encoder’, which creates a numerical representation of the person’s face. A second AI, a ‘decoder’, converts these internal representations back into an image. A fake image can be created by feeding encoded images into a different decoder, e.g. feeding a representation of Trump’s face into a decoder trained on Putin’s face. To create a video, this process is repeated on every frame. This concept isn’t limited to just visual media; voices can easily be cloned from a short recording.
What should we do about malicious deepfakes? Some suggest that AI is (ironically) the answer; one that detects deepfakes rather than produces them. Yet, as Hany Fraid, computer science Professor at the University of California says, “The number of people working on the video-synthesis side, as opposed to the detector side, is 100 to one.” Raising awareness that realistic video forgery exists will be crucial in getting audiences to scrutinize the origin of content. For now, Facebook, amongst most social media platforms, have taken the approach to ban deepfakes from its platforms completely. However, deepfakes have a purpose outside of propaganda and disinformation campaigns. David Attenborough’s authoritative voice could be the narrator of documentaries to come long after his death. Project Revoice is a non-profit dedicated to preserving the voices of ALS victims through voice cloning.
The effectiveness of deepfakes has already been seen in apparently accidental incidents. In 2018, a Flemish political party posted a deepfake of Donald Trump mocking Belgium for remaining in the Paris Climate Agreement. The video was crude by deepfake standards and even ends with ‘Trump’ professing “We all know that climate change is fake, just like this video.“ Yet furious Belgians could be found in the comments sections cursing Trump and Conservatism. If a primitive, self-admittedly false deepfake could have such an effect, what damage could government-sponsored propaganda do? The mere existence of deepfake technology has consequences without it actively being used in propaganda campaigns. In October 2016, during the United States Presidential elections, a video was published of Donald Trump describing his attempts to seduce a married woman in a now 20
I believe we will soon see widespread effects of deepfakes soon, possibly during the 2020 US elections. Public ignorance will allow high quality, targeted forgeries to cause damage before they are detected as fake. Nasir Memon, professor at New York University, puts it like this: “As a consequence of this, even truth will not be believed. The man in front of the tank at Tiananmen Square moved the world. Nixon on the phone cost him his Presidency. Images of horror from concentration camps finally moved us into action. If the notion of … believing what you see is under attack, that is a huge problem.”
BY CHARLES YAN PAN NG 21
CROSSING BORDERS WITH MONFLOY AN INTERVIEW BY ELLA FOX-MARTENS.
As a country whose isolation is both a gift and a difficulty, Australia’s musical life is largely internal. Tucked away on the west coast, Perth boasts an eclectic, thriving and talented subculture- but also one that can lack the cosmopolitan, diverse feel of other cities. When you’re so far away from even your own country’s capital, it’s easy to become disconnected. There are so many stories we don’t hear. Like a lot of people, I’ve begun to crave the unfamiliar. Mexican-Italian act Monfloy certainly occupy that space. Unbound by place, and armed with a wealth of experience, language and curiosity, they’re exploring storytelling with grace and talent. Their debut single I’m a Kite mixed a dreamy soundscape with a strong structure and sweet vocals, effortlessly engaging listeners in a story of frustration and the longing to be free. With an upcoming EP in 2020 and the release of a music video, they’re beginning to gain traction. I sat down in a buzzing, cold café in Rome, with lead singer Monica Bizzarri and guitarist Filippo Villani, to talk about modern music, stories, and writing.
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Ella Fox-Martens: How did you guys start making music together? Monica Bizzarri: It’s actually a strange story. There was no moment where we decided to make a band. I came here [to Rome], and I started studying guitar. My teacher told me very early on I should write a song about my life in Italy. A friend of mine loaned me a loop station, and I started playing around with that. Meanwhile, I met Filippo in April 2018 and I showed him the song and he encouraged me to write more. He liked what I wrote and started playing some guitars on top of it. We decided to record it, and it sounded cool so we added other guitars and some bass and drums and in less than two weeks, we had three songs almost ready to record. At the same time, a friend of mine in Mexico called me and asked me to record something. I said yes, and called this Mexican producer and me and Filippo went to Mexico and recorded everything. The producers were amazing. EF: Do you collaborate on songwriting? MB: Yes, we do. I usually write the lyrics and I bring Filippo the idea and he drops some guitar and I start singing and we record with a loop station. Then together we record it and find the bassline. Filippo Villani: I’m a Kite actually started with a guitar riff. We mixed in the lyrics she already had. EF: Do you have a preference between performing and recording? MB: I love recording- I find it very entertaining and creative. But it’s very tiring, because you’re always thinking. But also the concerts are super fun. At the beginning I got nervous because of the technical stuff, but now it’s getting better. EF: Is it a supportive scene in Rome? MB: (laughs) Not really. They actually tell you to bring your friends, which is ridiculous. We’d love to go out. EF: Where would you go? MB: Mexico! They’re very open to different types of music. Also I write in English, which is a problem because nobody here speaks in English. They would love me to write in Italian but I don’t, so… EF: Is there a reason for that? MB: English flows pretty well, I think. It’s very musical. Even though Italian is beautiful, it’s very difficult to make it flow. EF: What about Spanish? MB: Well, my first song was in Spanish. We actually have three songs in Spanish, but they are very simple, Mexican-style. I like them, but they can’t be mixed with the other songs because they’re too different.
EF: Is it difficult to define your genre? MB: Oh my god yeah. I mean, I would probably say dream-pop or indie. But it’s challenging to pin it down. EF: What kind of music do you guys listen to? I don’t want to say influence because that can be misleading- like a place or a person or feeling- but just the type of sounds you surround yourself with. MB: I grew up with my dad listening to a lot to Nick Drake and Sufjan Stevens, or a lot of jazz. My mom used to listen to Leonard Cohen (laughs). I actually have Nick Drake’s picture on the wall. FV: I like more post-rock and electronic music. I don’t have a specific influence really. MB: Me too. I can’t say my inspiration is just one thing. EF: I agree. So, what makes you want to write? MB: Well, I never write love songs; it would be too cheesy. I like writing stuff that makes me feel something, like an intense emotion I have to get out. Kite talks about this girl who is connected too much to the guy she lives with. She doesn’t have the power of her life, and she wants to fly away. We’re actually releasing a video that explains it better. EF: I always think it is crazy that people assume that musicians are always writing about themselves. MB: God, me too. I’m the most self-sufficient person ever. People always ask me if I’m the girl in the song, and I’m like “uh, of course not.” EF: Musicians are storytellers. Whether that’s about themselves or someone else. MB: Exactly. Most times, I’m writing a story. We have another song written from the perspective of bottles after the party, because I think that there are so many objects around us and if they could speak, they’d have so much to say. EF: What’s that called? And when is the EP coming out? MB: Silence. We don’t know quite when the EP is coming out, but we hope March. We’ve had it ready since July and we’re excited to share it with the world. EF: I think the world should be excited to hear it.
You can find Monfloy on Spotify, Instagram @monfloymusic and see their new YouTube video on their channel Monfloy. Keep an eye out for their upcoming EP, and treat your ears to something fresh, diverse and engaging (visit to Rome not required).
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BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ARTS? BY ABIGAIL MACLEOD
‘Arts’. We hear this word thrown around like confetti – but the arts are a unique subject, and one that Australia is beginning to rapidly neglect. “But me? That doesn’t affect me!” you may cry, watching the government scrap funding. But, my dear friend, it does. They’re everywhere, and they’re an integral part of what makes a society unique. Even my mother - whose drawings leave me astounded at how a ‘horse’ can look like both a potato and Boris Johnson - is affected by the arts. And the arts are so much more than the physical creations – it’s music, dance, drama, and performance - all of the things that enrich us as creative beings. The government, however, takes a wildly different stance. In November 2019, it was announced that the Australian Council for the Arts, a major federal funding agency, would decrease its funding allowance, so only fifty to sixty percent of arts groups will be receiving the payments they apply for in 2020. Contrasting this, according to the Department of Education, the federal government has allocated sixty-four million dollars towards teaching science and technology in schools. Transport, road, and rail has been allocated over seven billion dollars for the coming year; and with Scott Morrison making the decision to merge the arts with the Department of Transport, Infrastructure, and Regional Development, it becomes strikingly clear that the government is beginning to systematically disregard the arts in our society.
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BY ABIGAIL MACLEOD
Think of your favourite local band; favourite piece of Perth street art; or a play that left you in tears as the final curtain closed. Think of your mum’s prime-ministerial potato horses; your dad belting the Screaming Jets at a level only achievable by dads. Think of the artwork in the galleries that your friend keeps insisting, “just one more photo, for Instagram”. These are all integral parts of the arts in our society - and the political forces that pull the strings are beginning to shun them blatantly. It’s not simply about the funding – it’s the emphasis that we place on culture and the arts that’s important. The arts, holistically, provide something for the human psyche that only comes with creative processes. A study conducted by the Australian
Government shows that children who receive education in areas of the arts are better equipped to deal with problem-solving and decision-making. Being surrounded by creative settings is clinically proven to increase positivity, self-worth, and productivity. And yet, our government and Minister for Arts continue to drain the funds from groups and individuals who make the magic happen. So, what will become of us, the poor, artless masses? All hope is not lost. With events like FRINGE WORLD and Perth Festivals, and independent initiatives, the arts continue to blossom. And to those who say that traditional ‘smarts’ outweigh the benefits of the arts: I’d like to see your attempt at drawing a horse that doesn’t look like Boris Johnson.
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PHOTOGRAPHY BY TONI LI 26
ILLUSTRATION BY PAULINE WONG
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THE INTERNET ARRIVED.
DID HUMOUR LEAVE? BY GEORGE SAMIOS
In the days of internet yore – let’s say 2007 – memes were simple, pure, and basically just jokes in the form of JPEGs. The simple top text/bottom text format was a prime example; a character would dictate the subject or theme of the joke, the top row impact font text would be the set up, and the bottom row text brought it home as the punchline. Viral videos were there at the dawn of video sharing, LOL Cats turned the cute into comical, and who could forget ‘rage comics’? Unfortunately, they were on the same level as something you’d find in a bad issue of MAD Magazine. But as internet culture changed, memes changed with it. Irony and absurdism were thrown into the mix, and in no less than a decade, our perception of the pinnacle of comedy went from how strong Chuck Norris is to a low-resolution CGI head talking about ‘Bepis’. Like many readers, I grew up with this change. I saw the old folks’ set up/punchline memes of I Can Has Cheezburger fall as the nonconformist corner of social media rose. Memes started to make fun of memes, which made fun of those memes, which made fun of the memes that those idiots found funny which made fun of the memes that we used to find funny.
Now the wheel of irony has come full circle. It’s almost like we’re back at the start, but a little bit behind. Square one minus one. The irony is stripped away, and we just accept anything – even in its loosest form – to be a meme. I’m not in any position to claim these new memes are an art form, but they’re extremely comparable to surrealist humour. A low-resolution image of Markiplier’s face on Lord Farquaad’s body with the letter ‘E’ attached has context, but is still illogical nonsense. That’s the point, and anyone in the Western world under the age of twenty-five finds it to be damn hilarious. No matter how you look at it, that’s culturally significant. Even its subject matter-from the concerns of a future World War to the millennial obsession with self-deprecation – nothing is considered heavy or taboo as long as it’s presented in a meme format. So, what’s happened to humour? Or to be more wanky about it, what is happening? I’m of the belief that our sense of humour is aging faster than our culture is. The twenty-first century can be a confusing, strange and absurd place for most young people. It’s almost fitting that the new era of comedy reflects that.
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CAN WE PLEASE LEAVE CANCEL CULTURE IN 2019 BY CAMERON CARR
I honestly don’t understand how in a world of media distortion, lies and manipulation, we can take anything as being completely true or even authentic anymore. I remember doing a first year communications unit back in 2017, where we discussed this theory of a ‘Post-Truth World’. The repercussions of ignorance, at least for me, only became clear in 2019. To cut a long definition short, ‘Cancel Culture’ is a social media phenomenon, wherein fans deem an individual’s speech and/or actions as going against typically progressive social values. However, it’s important to note a few things here. I have no issues with holding people accountable; in the pre-internet era of the Watergate Scandal, then American President Richard Nixon resigned, and life moved on. The problem with ‘Cancel Culture’ is that it exists in a space of echo chambers. In the 1980s, you couldn’t avoid hearing about a scandal like Watergate if you tried. Nowadays, very few people even watch the news, and there are even fewer attempts to watch different media outlets in a balanced way to gain varying perspectives. The way we hear about whether a celebrity has done the wrong thing is most often from profit driven media companies who make millions off viral ‘exposed’ and ‘apology’ videos. This is problematic mostly because not only do people become misinformed, they are encouraged to act in a certain way, much to the joy
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of media conglomerates and dismay of relatively powerless individuals. The main issue I have with Cancel Culture, is the mistreatment of individuals by internet trolls jumping on a band wagon. The extreme stress and loss of income for unfairly ‘Cancelled’ individuals is massive, as they often lose sponsorships, contracts and social media followings. Look at James Charles; there was no actual evidence of wrong doing against him, yet he lost millions of subscribers and personal deals. And lastly, the main reason Cancel Culture really needs to stay in 2019 is that it promotes ‘Shutdown Culture’. There’s no explaining your side of the story when your audience stops following you on social media. Apologies fall on deaf ears and many undeserving people probably can’t recover. I’m not saying that we shouldn’t stand up for social justice; in fact, I believe that Cancel Culture in and of itself is injustice. It leads to celebrities desperately suing media companies for defamation. It looks like so-called fans jumping at any excuse to make something go viral, harmful or not. Cancel Culture never was, and still is not, a right or freedom of speech. It is a corporate tool to control the masses and not let the victims speak. Can we please just go back to watching the news, ideally multiple channels.
I was meant to write an article about being a first year. Then on Tuesday, a fake account sent a long rambling voice memo to my LinkedIn profile. Instead of my original article, I have decided to present a full transcript of that message. “Salutations. I want you to transcribe this message and put it in the first edition of Pelican. My article is about being a first year (‘fresher’) at UWA. Be warned: if you do not publish my article, I have friends in the Oceanographic Institute who could make life very difficult for you. I know you might dismiss this as an idle threat, but frankly, that would be ill-advised. The ocean is deep and mysterious. When you look at the ocean, do you think you understand it? No. You don’t understand the Ocean. Only the Oceanographic Institute does. You should fear them.” “Now I will turn to address you, dear reader. Know this: your first year will be less fun than mine was. I started university in 2014. Back then, UWA was fun. My first O-Day featured erotic dancers, a live penguin, and free sour sherbets. My favourite sherbet flavour is malt, and that year, I ate more than ever before. These days you will be lucky to find any malt sherbet at O-Day. I want a malt sherbet. Excuse me for a second.” [At this point, the recording goes silent for seven minutes. When the speaker returns, he is breathing heavily.] “-… and don’t get me started on The Tav! It used to be so dirty! Brilliant! And the - [redacted for your safety] - I don’t know if she ever succeeded before the Guild crushed them with an earth compactor. These days The Tav is gentrified, and the [once again redacted for your safety] smells of horseradish.” “Indeed, it is also the truth that clubs were more exciting back then. We had student societies like the Mr. Gribble Dibble Club, The Sausage and Bun
FAR FROM GRUNTLED: A SEMIREGULAR COLUMN IF SOMEONE KNOWS WHO MESSAGED ME THIS, THEN PLEASE LET ME KNOW BY RUPERT WILLIAMSON
Appreciation Society, and SpaceX. These days, clubs spend all their time making daisy chains and hugging dolphins, and the Guild has no space program to speak of. Instead they spend all our money on ‘wellness days’. We don’t need another student busker on Oak Lawn doing an acoustic cover of an Arctic Monkeys song! In almost every public place today, the ears are assailed by pop music. Everywhere you hear music disgorged into the air by speakers; usually invisible and inaccessible speakers that cannot be punished for their impertinence. Some places brand themselves with their own signature sound: folk, jazz, or excerpts from Broadway musicals…” Here, the speaker trails off into incoherent muttering. Then the tape ends. I have promised my Editors that I will actually write my own article next time, rather than just transcribe an audio message I was sent on LinkedIn.
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THE INTRODUCTION OF JOI FROM BLADE RUNNER 2049 BY BEN NIXON
There have been many character introductions in films that left a distinct impression on me. Something about their actions, appearance, or dialogue fascinated me in a short amount of time. For a while, I’ve wanted to write about the introduction of Joi in Blade Runner 2049 (2017). I highly recommend people see the film before they read about this character’s introduction. The impact of the scene is much better than how I can describe it. Blade is set in a dystopian, future Los Angeles. The character of Joi is introduced when Officer K, who ‘retires’ (kills) outdated androids, arrives home from his work as a Blade Runner. In his apartment, the voice of his wife, Joi, can be heard. She says “you’re home early” in a very casual way. The audience assumes she’s in another room, while the camera follows K as he removes his coat and tidies himself. K and Joi have a conversation about how her day was, she says she’s getting cabin fever; this is a very basic introduction for a supporting character. We see K enter several rooms, but Joi isn’t anywhere, still talking about her day. Something’s off. K offers her a drink, and she accepts. Glumly, K ‘clinks’ the now-poured glass sitting on the counter with his own, and drinks. He consumes the other glass, implying that Joi is not physically there, and K is used to this.
K sits down and, finally, Joi appears; a hologram from a ceiling projector, she walks in and places a tray of dinner in front of him. What really impressed me about this character introduction is how I got lost in it at first. It’s almost deliberately a cliché of the “hi honey, how was work?” scene - until the holographic reveal. In this world, people can buy holograms that look and behave very realistically. While Joi seems happy and delighted to see her husband, there’s an awkwardness to the scene. K seems very distant emotionally; he knows she isn’t real, but he tries to tell himself that she is. He’s especially glum when he drinks both glasses, and Joi mentions that a song was ‘top of the charts’ in the 1960s. This ties into the way current apps and programs announce facts for no real reason. Joi’s character is very much like an app; she’s a virtual, customizable hologram that reinforces the theme of humans and machines being blurred in the world of the film. Joi is an ambitious character. I can understand why she won’t click with many audiences. She’s quite one-sided, but in a deliberate way. She shows the nature of this world; holographic people are created, so that Blade Runners don’t feel so alone. The question posed is whether programs can and should provide company.
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INERTIA BY ANNA KIMPTON
the resistance of any physical object to any change in its velocity.
The inertia and shock of being thrown back into the 9-5 world of business and study
Only upon leaving my hometown or family after visiting
breaks me back down every time.
do I go into this involuntary state of sadness. The little girl inside of this independent woman resists Innately crying for her mum and dad, once again Mourning the loss of homely comfort. It’s nothing I can describe until it happens until I’m driving away in the opposite direction of the familiar land I spent 18 years of my life in. with nothing but passing scenes of familiar land left behind me
Every time I knowingly come back to the same security blanket and Every time it’s time to leave I forget again how to cope. I exist as a lost child trapped in a woman’s body Knowing what she’s doing Knowing exactly where to be And where to go. But it’s only for a moment,
Collapsing as a new land of uncertainty rushes towards me.
because then I’m back up again, carried away by the velocity of everyday city life.
I sob as I drive away further from away them,
The inertia disappears for now
yearning for the familiarity and security of home.
and I forget about my longing for home
After they leave from visiting me here, I feel the same stinging pain still
Which awaits
because a part of me cries and leaves with them every time.
once again my next arrival.
The world stops without me knowing when I am there. I exist in a blanket of tranquillity and safety. Lost in a trance, I catch up on all my childhood memories Co-existing peacefully in my natural habitat.
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CAN YOU BUILD A CITY WITH LEGO AND A VR HEADSET? BY GARY IWANSANTOSO
You are probably familiar with the colourful interlocking bricks that can be assembled to form miniature versions of pretty much anything. If this sounds like your childhood, then you may be delighted to know that LEGO may soon return to become catalysts in construction of life-sized infrastructure. The unprecedented progress of technology has stretched human capability, much of which has gone unnoticed, yet this progress can simply be felt and acknowledged by most. ‘Impossible’ has become a label for ‘coming soon’. Ideas previously dismissed ideas are now met with curiosity and persistence. The spotlight in engineering breakthroughs are often directed at those making our sci-fi dreams a reality – Elon Musk has attained celebrity status with Tesla and SpaceX . However, many equally important world-changing innovations are quietly emerging throughout countless disciplines.
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So, can we really build a city with LEGO and a VR headset? Now this is a question that one engineering research project, right here at UWA, is seeking to answer. But why exactly? Take Asia, particularly China, where land is scarce and population is booming. Based on 2018 trends, China must supply a total floor area equivalent to Perth’s northern suburbs every year to meet their growing housing demand. As of 2016, they’ve set a highly ambitious yearly target at the floor area of Perth itself. 20 to 30 years ago these proposals would have stayed as just that – unrealistic wishful thinking. Alright, so where does LEGO come into all this? Well, one day, someone happened to realise that a hotel is made of rooms with very similar layouts (shocking). So instead of constructing everything on site, as it traditionally is, they decided; why not
make a factory to produce those rooms, send it off on a big truck and then use cranes to play life-sized LEGO? It’s not exactly what happened, but you get the point. This method of construction is now known today as Prefabricated Modular Construction (PMC). Buildings with rooms of similar layouts are made of ‘modules’ that are ‘prefabricated’ offsite to simply connect onsite - much like the plastic bricks from Denmark. Cheaper, faster, and higher quality than traditional methods, China is turning to PMC to provide affordable housing to meet their demand. However, one significant challenge is that PMC involves complex systems and concepts that are commercially inefficient. Most structural engineers aren’t even familiar with it today. Enter technology. The UWA research project is combining developments in Virtual Reality and structural modelling to understand PMC like never before. Complex systems can be easily visualised and simulated, and data-driven modelling introduces automation functions for the design phase. To an engineer, these innovations are not dissimilar to a box of toys, to be mixed and matched to solve problems regarded as impossible twenty years ago. The next steps are a list of possibilities; use VR
to place modules as if it was LEGO, using the automation functions to calculate for the right steel members as you do. Upgrade from Virtual to Augmented Reality and use actual LEGO blocks to simulate the model on top of schematic drawings. The possibilities are truly endless. But there’s two sides to any coin. Movies and art made by a robot might not feel right without the touch of a human. So, does it feel right to let computers alone build entire cities when the consequences are infinitely more significant? It is inevitable that the process and our mindsets will continue changing rapidly as technology evolves. PMC may well be infused with AI and Machine Learning, and one day a computer will study construction and learn how to do it better than us - humans becoming the tool. Maths and physics courses will eventually diminish in importance in favour of analysis software. How long before cities no longer need LEGO and VR headsets to be built, but merely a press of a button? The art of engineering is at risk of losing soul, as we continue to forfeit control to machines. Technology is an enabler. A maker of unimagined possibilities with endless potential. It changes the world by solving its problems, and it changes our approach to welcome the impossible. So, how will we welcome technology when the next big thing arrives at our doorstep?
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ARRIVAL OF THE TRUE SELF BY MERLIN HOSKINS
CW: SELF-HARM.
You hesitate when asked to write down your address. You hover your pen over the box, and the librarian smiles at you. Holden Barina 2009 Hatchback. Blue. Better than leaving it blank, you suppose. You slide the book into your backpack, careful not to crush your birth certificate. You are interested in the book, you promise yourself, as you bid the nice librarian farewell; but you are much more interested in the hardback’s ability to serve as a nice writing desk. How did you get here? Where are you? The real you - resplendent and terrible, the one for whom this present you is merely an endless placeholder. You are broken, fractured and poisonous. You leave nasty, oily fingerprints on the things you love. You were woken up this morning by a suburban mother power walking with her friends at sunrise.
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She rapped angrily on her car window and said that if you didn’t move your car, that she would call the police. You move your car. You park at uni at 5:45 that morning, find that space you like that has the comfy couches. You don’t sit on any of them. You elect to just lie face down on the floor and trust that the level of discomfort you’re experiencing will prevent you from falling asleep. You try sleeping at uni sometimes. More often than not, security wakes you up. No sleeping on campus, after all. How did you get here? In your mind, you are always driving. Out by Mandurah, an hour away from the city, where you come close to outstripping the despair that wraps along your heart like cling-film. Your car is dented and scratched, like you; indicator broken, and floor full of leaves. The grinding of the axels telling you that you need a wheel realignment you can’t afford. Your snail shell. Out on the freeway, late at night, you play a game with yourself. Close your eyes for one, two, three, as long as you can stand.
You’re trying to keep time with your therapist, but by her own admittance, there’s very little either of you can do for the time being. You have no effort to do anything because it’s been months since you’ve gotten a good night’s sleep. You might be addicted to caffeine, but that’s a problem for much, much later. She asks you if you’ve been cutting again, and you make vague statements to try and bait her towards other repressed traumas. Your fingers still alight on your wrists, rubbing at the scars underneath; you watch how she seems to note that down. On your ankle you used to have a birthmark that looked a little like a wolf’s head. It’s hidden under rough, torn scarring now. You play a lot of Skyrim in your spare time. Your laptop - GarbageBoy - shouldn’t be able to run it, but in an act akin to Atlas holding the Earth aloft, somehow he manages. You watch Elf - that Christmas movie with Will Ferrell in it - once for every day in December. It’s not the least stimulating film you’ve ever seen. It tries to straddle both a pro- and anti-consumerist stance, which is bold, you think to yourself at two in the morning on December the 17th. You grow very fond of James Caan’s performance. You have two boyfriends. One is tall and goldenhaired and smiles with all the power of the sun. The other is slender, willowy, and seems to slip through your hands like liquid lightning. You will never know which one of them was the father of your baby.
Sometimes you lay your hand on your stomach, and you’ll swear you can feel yourself pregnant. A phantom nightmare lurking under your palm. You get really drunk one night, and pull up your metaphorical crazy board, and tell your friend Vera all about how Project Runway is heavily submerged in Freudian theory. Id, ego, superego, you chant. It’s all there, in a classic trio composed of a two sex - one sex arrangement, (you get sidetracked here talking about biological sex and the bimodal spectrum it exists on), but one man and two women in this case. Michael Kors is present as the ego Heidi Klum is the id - Nina García is the superego. You stop in the middle of a sentence to look at something crooked halfway across the room. You turn your body so as to see it correctly, but your drink goes with you and you tip it all over your foot. Your sunshine boyfriend bundles you into the back of your car, and blessedly, you only have the lightest of hangovers in the morning. Nothing seems real anymore. Time feels like it is blowing past you. You are completely uprooted from anything material. Weeks wash over your head like hot water, and your whole being is being sucked somewhere black, like you’re being poured down a drain. You blink once - months pass in the smallest of gaps in your attention - you blink twice, and everything is grey, dismal, and never-ending. You curl up in your backseat. Spine aching, you feel all cracked open and sun bleached.
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ARRIVALS: FIRST-YEAR, FIRST-CLASS ADVICE FROM A COMMERCE STUDENT BY MILLIE MUROI
PAGING PASSENGER [EIGHT-DIGIT-STUDENT-NUMBER]. PLEASE MAKE YOUR WAY TO GATE UWA; YOUR CLASS COMMENCES SHORTLY.
I’m running late to my first tutorial, lost-on-campus app in hand, puffing like a passive smoker. I’m not an econometrician, but the distance from the bus to Business School is approximately 1500 metres, and running after a Hackett big breakfast inevitably leads to suboptimal outcomes. While I attend to a searing stitch, here are a couple of tips for getting to your departure gate on time. Lost on Campus Download and know how to use this app: it is infinitely better at finding specific tutorial rooms than google maps once you are on campus. Transperth Optimisation For public transport users, the 97 and 96 buses run along Broadway, and bring you as close to the business school as the green Mercedes can get you. Awkwardly clutching my side, I glance up to see a friend waving at me, their smile siphoning to confusion as I grimace. To their inquiry regarding my compromised state I reply, “too much food, too little time, too few travelators”. While I am sucked into conversation, blissfully wasting precious time, here are more nuggets of wisdom for you to access at your leisure. Join some (business school) Clubs Sign up for memberships, apply for committees, and turn up to events (especially in your first year), even if you think you’ll be that awkward outlier. Believe me, we all are at some point. If not now, when?
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Become an Investment Banker Sign up for finance competitions. From constructing a portfolio, to valuing a company, to planning a hostile takeover, there are a bunch of free competitions which give you practical experience you won’t get in class. They’re a great way to meet some incredible people, including industry professionals and lifelong friends as you spend your nights grumbling but low-key living up to the pretence of being investment bankers. New Frontiers At the risk of parroting my third piece of advice, uni is about grades and preparing for a future career, but equally about the people you meet and the wacky chances you take. Take the leap of faith: ask for help, start a conversation with that person in your tutorial you find mildly attractive, or sign up to things on your own - I promise they’ll lead to some of the most rewarding opportunities. Detangling myself from conversation, I inwardly decide that if I can’t manage my own time, my chances of becoming a fund manager are pretty slim. Finally, I bust through some glass doors and spot the familiar ticker tape scrolling above me. The time at our destination is [redacted]. Thank you for flying with QUANT airlines. Welcome to Business School.
KATH & KIM & THE CASTLE BY CAMPBELL WILLIAMSON
I have spent an ungodly chunk of this summer quoting classic Australian TV and cinema. Well, mainly Kath & Kim and The Castle but what’s more classic than that? Huh!? Summer well spent. Anyway, while I was chuckling to myself about a joke made twenty years ago, it occurred to me that this comedy is all about repetition. Well, not all about it, obviously. That would be silly. But I would say a fair chunk of it is. Repetition is the bedrock on which canon Australian shows like Kath & Kim and The Castle are built, and it is a large part of what makes them social shows. If you believe me, you can stop here now, please. This might get niche. Ok let’s start with some basic Kath & Kim. Flick on an ep of this beloved show with a packet of Barbeque Shapes and a bottle of Baileys, and you’ll likely find some of these gems. For a start, there is the Kath Day-Knight spectacular “look at moi,” and “it’s noice (yeah it is nice) it’s different (yeah it’s unusual).” They pop up and pop off in just about every episode. Similarly, it’ll be pretty common in a given episode for crowd favourite Sharon Strzelecki to enter using the squeaky sliding glass door and say something like “Oh hey Mrs. D,” which is met with the obligatory “Oh hi Sharon luv.” These moments
are varied ep to ep or season to season but you’ll recognise them when they inevitably appear onscreen or off it. They’re moments that you can (and will, relentlessly) parrot with your neighbours or friends and at your office buddies to be labelled ‘Office Funnyman’. And it’s not only the sitcom! This sort of quotable, social comedy is everywhere in the vibe of The Castle. Here, you’ll find often-repeated phrases such as “how’s the serenity?”, “we’re going to Bonnie Doon” and “what’s this darl? Spongecake. Spongecake.” Steve is called an “ideas man” by his father and brother four times in the space of fourteen seconds. Go and look that up on YouTube! Or don’t, and tell me I’m dreaming! These are the sort of jokes that repeat several times in the shows and several times in my dayto-day, and it is precisely this repetition that gives all of these moments their social accessibility. It doesn’t matter which episode you watched; if your estranged Auntie Eliza (the one whose Christmas hat didn’t fit) says “look at moi”, you’ll understand. It’s accessible, it’s social and it’s a large part of how these shows have remained relevant twenty years later. Oh! And it’s noice (yeah it is nice).
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ENCOUNTERS AND PERSPECTIVES: AN INTERVIEW WITH ARCHITECT EMILY VAN EYK BY RIVA-JEAN LANDER
Practicing architect, lecturer, and teacher Emily Van Eyk works with her business partner to design practical, thoughtful, and clever solutions for their clients. Arts Editor Riva-Jean Lander met up with her to discuss her views on architecture; what it takes to become a good designer; and how small changes can make all the difference. Riva-Jean Lander: What made you decide to pursue architecture? Emily Van Eyk: I wanted to do something in the field of making art, but I didn’t want to be completely broke. I don’t want to give any false pretences that a career in architecture makes any money but I think at the time I thought it was a more solid course, rather than just a career in making art. RL: What is involved in starting up your own business? EVE: So much. It’s such a massive but beautiful learning curve. It doesn’t feel daunting if you take it one step at a time and is so insightful into how everything works. The best thing for my business partner, Jessica Mountain, and I was actually having a physical space where we worked from. Our studio gives us a place where people can meet with us, and provides a separate psychological place for us to work and create. You also want to find someone you like working with! My business partner and I have complementary strengths and ways of viewing the world. We have a similar appreciation for things, and importantly neither of us have a problem with letting go of our designs. RL: Do you feel there is a style to your architecture? EVE: Not so much in terms of aesthetics, but there is a style to our process. We are into ‘clever design’, meaning we like to solve multiple problems with one move. An example of this is how we designed a sheltered path to our clients’ outdoor bathroom. During one of our conversations, they mentioned how much they liked fish, so when we showed them three options, we included one that was an undercover accessway, with stepping stones over a fishpond – and they loved it! It’s a simple idea, which has multiple appreciations.
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RL: So, the theme of this Pelican issue is ARRIVE. With this in mind, what architectural considerations would you make when designing the entrance, or any other elements that relate to the experience of arriving at a building? EVE: Shelter. You need to shelter people. We mostly work in residential architecture, so we consider how people come home. We think about how people need shelter not only in the sense of keeping the rain off you, but also providing a space you feel sheltered by from other elements, such as a sense of safety. This can be provided by a slight bit more privacy when they enter their home, or including a spot where they can rest their bags against. Those small things make that transition feel comfortable both physically and psychologically. Another thing to consider is people who are new to the building and how you provide them with a signal of where to go and how to move through the building. RL: What are some disciplines or practices that architecture relates to, and how do they connect/ relate? EVE: We work with a lot of disciplines due to the nature of our work. We often work with structural engineers, who are amazing and we appreciate their opinion a lot. Anthropologists are great too. They can offer completely fresh ways of thinking that you’re not used to. Usually, they also provide communication with communities, and can remind you of what people would actually care about. Landscapes architects are excellent and we’d love to use them more.
BY TRAVIS HAYTO/UWA
RL: What are some important skills to create a good designer?
RL: Are there any feelings you try to create through your architecture and how do you achieve them?
EVE: I think being shrewd is really important; being really critical, researched based, and taking everything into account. Largely from an environmental perspective, we have to stop obsessing with aesthetics. While concrete is beautiful and is one of the most used construction materials in the world, it requires a huge amount of energy. It’s also important to prioritise where you use particular materials. Concrete could be really useful if it’s a part of the building that will last for a really long time, but don’t use it for kitchens – someone’s going to rip them out in 10 years!
EVE: While the form and proportions are important to consider, this is not the genesis of a project for me. I think of how it feels, and how to mark definite demarcations of space. This can be done through different ceiling heights in rooms, through lighting, shades and materials. For us, this begins in our initial sketches where we draw sensations and atmospheres we are wanting to create, rather than a complete building.
RL: What are your thoughts on the lifecycle of buildings?
EVE: When you start out, continue to design on the side and share your ideas. Often, you begin with mundane work. By creating, you can continue to hone your skills, get more recognition, and move into designing your own projects. Secondly, I’d recommend that you keep up your research and rigor from your academic experiences, but also take on board the basic, but important things you learn from working for an experienced architect.
EVE: Someone once suggested to me that maybe the Hagia Sophia is the most environmentally friendly building in the world because it’s still used by people and is one of the oldest buildings still standing. I do think buildings should last longer, but only if it is the type of building should last a long time. Some places change a lot more rapidly, such as hospitality.
RL: What advice do you have for emerging architects?
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CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK IS THE MORRISON GOVERNMENT’S NEXT TEST BY MICHAELA TAM
In what has unfolded to be a summer of costly political miscalculations, it seems as though the government cannot catch a break with criticism. In December of last year, Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s eminently ill-timed tropical holiday sparked outrage as bushfires continued to burn in Australia. To add insult to injury, the government’s seemingly lackadaisical response to the bushfire crisis upon his return did the exact opposite of mollifying the public. Multiple “photo-ops” with firefighters and a self-aggrandising advertising campaign touting Morrison’s decision to call in Australia’s defence force seemed flagrantly contrived and faced heavy condemnation. The handling of the sports rorts scandal in January only worsened public opinion, with Morrison doubling down on his defence of Nationals Deputy Bridget Mckenzie, despite reports which showed that she misused taxpayer funds to further her party’s political interests. Now, as novel coronavirus hits Australian shores, the government’s ability to respond adequately will be watched closely and put to the test again. According to Chinese authorities, the first case the coronavirus was detected in early December 2019, and by early January 2020, a novel strain of coronavirus was declared and named 2019-nCoV. In what seemed like no time, the virus had spread overseas to places including the United States, South-East Asia, Europe and Australia. The number
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of cases worldwide exceeded 8,000 by the end of January, with hundreds perishing from the virus in mainland China. In Australia, a nation which shares immense economic and interpersonal ties with China, the number of cases across the country seem to increase by the day, putting pressure on Morrison to respond vigilantly to what the World Health Organisation declared as an “international emergency”.
be able to, pursue. This is reminiscent of a similarlyconvoluted government plan to compensate only volunteer firefighters from New South Wales, and not firefighters from other Australian states.
When it emerged that approximately 600 Australian citizens were trapped in Wuhan, the epicentre of the deadly virus, plans were announced to evacuate the elderly and children—not back to Australia, but to Christmas Island, as a quarantine area. Unsurprisingly, this was lambasted across the board; Gordon Thomson, the Shire Council Mayor of Christmas Island stated that such plans would “create a convict settlement for innocent people; now we’ll be a leper colony”.
Other measures undertaken by the Morrison government include updating its Smart Traveller website to urge Australians to “reconsider your need to travel to China”. However, Australians want the government to do more than immaterial website updates;—for instance, a petition on Change.org garnered nearly 17,000 signatures as university and school semesters started up again, requesting that the NSW education department implement a mandatory two-week isolation period for students who have recently returned from China (many schools had already begun isolating pupils who visited China to stop the spread of the deadly virus, however, there was no reinforcement from the government).
Moreover, with affected families reportedly being charged $1,000 per person for the privilege of an evacuation to Christmas Island, many of those trapped have also expressed their concerns, with some even stating that they would “rather stay in Wuhan”. Rather than showing moral leadership, it appears that the Morrison Government offered up a plan, which on first glance seemed to help those in need, but in reality, would involve a process so onerous and inconvenient that few would want to, or
Countries such as Japan and the US have put Australia’s current response to shame, each airlifting hundreds of their own citizens out of Wuhan, back to their home countries, without imposing a compulsory quarantine in a foreign country. Needless to say, Australia could be doing far more; now, more than ever, Australia needs its government to recoup, reflect and regain control of its agenda, and then demonstrate the conviction and drive to ensure that all their citizens are safe.
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A NEW DAY
YOU _ ARRIVE
BY ISABELLE YUEN
BY ELLIE FISHER
Five tonne weights rest heavily upon bare eyelids
the woman is perfected
Numbing comfort of stale blankets and damp pillowcases
—Sylvia Plath, ‘Edge’
Soothe my psyche I ignore uninvited day in favour of quilt-covered night A distant bell sounds, and I am roused once more A distant call to arms, a sickening monotone Faint pleas for lucidity, raindrop tears roll down the windshield Clearing a dust-free path beyond the haze in my mind
day begins _ the italic sky bent across _ eye-white pale the cyclopic sun _ gazing on with _ existential vacancy your heart _ sings its triumph iris dark _ pericardial embrace electric tempo _ the exclamation
My head throbs mercilessly
of the blood _ keeping you sane
An incessant pounding of bass in my ear drums Eyelids refuse to be prised apart by half-hearted fingers I sink back into dreamless slumber I cannot be awake The pills leave my mouth dry and my throat sore, a bitter-sour aftertaste Still trumps the daytime demons I don’t want to meet them Not again. A dim light in my foggy subconscious What is it this time? My eyelids, heavier still. Nobody ever said it would be easy For a moment, the light flickers uneasily Uncertain about its place in this murky underworld It’s a new day. I open my eyes. Blue black bruises swell slightly, tender to touch.
by watchful avarice _ circle you even the trees _ are hungry eucalypt bark _ peeling to ellipses other _ dawn shadows _ longing eyes keen as _ question marks walking through rain _ drawn to the earth _ dwindling _ in semicolons the waters break _ your parenthetical shackles snap _ the slap _ of damp feet fresh from _ the night womb your skin _ a raw membrane flesh sliding _ into the biting air _ your thighs _ your hair virginal _ aloof _ you are unneedful _ of another’s apostrophes
Shapeless masses lurk just beyond the confines of my awakened mind
new born _ to the morning
I blink once,
you are _ curved _ honed
They’re gone
a crystalline macron _ finally
For now.
perfected _ you arrive
Sunlight pools in my palms, A wordless warmth against my breast I have arrived.
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mechanical gulls _ wound up
AN INTERVIEW WITH GUILD PRESIDENT BRE SHANAHAN BY CAMERON CARR
Cameron Carr: Can you introduce yourself, what you do and what you’re studying? Bre Shanahan: My name is Bre, I am the Guild President and I am studying my Juris Doctor. CC: What are some of your favourite aspects about being a UWA student? BS: I have to say, I am a big fan of the grounds and location itself. There are so many beautiful places to explore and we have a bloody Art Gallery!! (I didn’t find this out until fifth year). But I think what really makes UWA special is there is a place for everyone, whether you like sports, arts, gaming, politics, partying – whatever. There’s always something to get involved in, through a club or FacSoc. CC: Being a fresher can be an intimidating prospect, do you remember how you felt back in the day? BS:I was so shocked that you didn’t have to be on campus every day. I didn’t know how you could possibly learn things without being in class 9am – 3pm. After that, I just remember feeling intimidated because of the huge size of UWA – “Lost on Campus” was a huge help in that time. CC: A key part of student life is socialising. Any tips on meeting new people outside your usual social circle? BS: I think it’s important to make a really conscious effort to get involved in things. It can be super intimidating finding your feet in a new place, knowing maybe a handful of people and trying to adjust to being independent. Head along to sundowners, join a club or your FacSoc, check out speed friending or find a sports club. Embrace it! CC: A lot of freshers have just left high school and will start managing their own time for a change. Have any advice about uni/life balance? BS: I don’t think I know anyone that has found the perfect uni/life balance, and it’s definitely something I struggle with. Setting achievable goals and finding a rhythm early on really helps. Finding
study groups (some FacSocs and class reps run these) can keep you on track. Different things work for different people so try out a few routines and figure out works for you. CC: Stress is really common and can be hard to deal with. What things can students do to help avoid/ cope with stress? BS: It might be a bit simplistic but try not to fall behind. Most stress comes from catching up so set a bit of time each week to catch up on the lectures you’ve missed. And don’t forget to take some time out to switch off. Find something that you can just do without having to think about everything else going on around you. CC: If students are struggling with keeping on top of studies, what can they do to overcome this? BS: Definitely don’t feel trapped in the 4 unit per semester model. There are so many alternatives that you can try with your faculty advisors. You can also head along to STUDY Smarter to pick up some tips on everything from research, writing and study techniques to time management and statistics. Don’t be afraid to reach out if you’re struggling. CC: How can students and freshers get more involved on campus? BS: UWA has over 150 clubs so you’re bound to find one that gels with you! Start with your Faculty Society or discipline-specific club and you can branch out to all sorts of other things. You can find them all on the Guild website! You can also check out our Guild Departments or come down to InterFac sport (it’s social sport so you don’t have to be any good!) on Wednesdays. CC: Anything you’d like to add? BS: Come to the Uni Student Climate Strike on Friday March 13! More info on the back of this magazine.
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SUPERMAN RETURNS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF RETURNING BY MIKEY ISITT
OUR GENERATION ARRIVED IN A POST-9/11 WORLD. WE GREW UP WITH CHALLENGING KID’S MOVIES, AS A RESULT.
QUICK PLOT Superman has been on a five-year smoko, searching the universe for remnants of his home planet. He returns to Earth to find a world losing hope (a post9/11 world, if you will), with Lex Luthor up to his old schemes, and former lover Lois Lane pissed off at him.
WHY SUPERMAN RETURNS?
RAW FACTS
Looking back on my childhood, I can’t help but remember Superman Returns as a standout movie. Not cos it was a great piece of cinema, but because it scared the shit outta me.
Director: Bryan Singer
Raised on the colourful Christopher Reeve movies from a lifetime ago, I grew up cheering for goodies like ‘Supes’, a dude who wore bright red, yellow, and blue tights. The same man who battled against equally-ridiculous baddies like the Elmer Fuddlooking Lux Luthor (Gene Hackman), and the pompous General Zod (Terrance Stamp). It was all a big laugh.
Availability: I had to rent it on Youtube for five bucks.
Sadly, millennials didn’t grow up in those days. We grew up post-9/11; a time when world leaders thought invading the Middle East was a good idea. A time of paranoia and fear of flying. A time when childhood-hero Steve Irwin, of all people, tragically left our screens forever. A time when nothing made sense, and everything seemed doomed. Dark times indeed.
Watching Returns at the cinema in 2006, I recognised the main players from the old movies, but they had different faces. Earnest-yet-knowing Christopher Reeve became a brooding and shy Brandon Routh, and bombastic Gene Hackman became the creepy Kevin Spacey!
When the electrifying teaser trailer for Superman Returns hit screens, eight-year-old me was blown away. I was ready to see my hero Supes, literally the symbol of hope, fight the baddies of today, and bring a smile to my face once again. But I was super let down. The movie sucked. Not only did it suck, it deeply unnerved me.
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Starring: Brandon Routh, Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth
Rating: Read below :)
WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE?
As the ‘Man of Steel’, Routh had barebones dialogue to work with, and his super suit only blends in with the dull colours around him. He’s given no opportunity to shine. And don’t even get me started about Spacey. His deadpan expressions frightened me as a kid, and, with the benefit of hindsight (he’s widely known as a shit bloke nowadays), unnerve me even today.
LEX LUTHOR’S KRYPTONITE SHANK Returns also stands out for its use of ‘kryptonite’, Superman’s only weakness; green crystals that represent trauma and pain. In the old movie, Lex puts a cool Kryptonite chain on Supes and chucks him in the pool. In Returns, in a scene that will always stay with me, Lex shanks my hero with a kryptonite shiv and throws him in the ocean, but only after Lex’s henchmen beat the shit out of Superman and tortured him for no reason. That scene terrified eight-year-old me. Maybe I’m a sensitive millennial, but I reckon superhero movies should be for kids. I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that no way should a shanking scene of any kind be in a kid’s movie!
GETTIN’ SPOOKY Returns wasn’t the only movie that showed us the dark side. In the years following 9/11, heaps of kid’s movies got all spooky on us. I remember the third Harry Potter, the Azkaban One, causing a stir among parents for having an M rating. The dreaded Dementors would turn out to be the least of Harry’s worries; the poor bloke deals with the trauma of losing close friends and family at the end of seemingly every subsequent instalment. Also, I’m not ashamed to admit that I bawled my eyes out during The Spongebob Squarepants Movie (2004), when Spongebob and Patrick literally died (and were quickly brought back to life). Horrifying.
HOW MOVIES HELP US DEAL WITH TRAUMA I’m lucky to have grown up on the polite, quiet streets of Subiaco, but there is a danger in staying completely sheltered. There comes a time when you’ve gotta learn that the world isn’t a big fairy floss house; that life isn’t a walk in the park. The world is definitely scary at times, and you’re lucky if you’re able to learn this lesson the easy way, through movies. That’s why I like to revisit superhero movies. They teach us childhood lessons we may have forgotten over time; lessons about courage, persistence, resilience, and other attributes that help us take on the world. Our world may get gloomy and frightening at points, but as long there are heroes out there, fighting for what’s right, we can be inspired to do so ourselves. Superman, the very symbol of hope, may have got the shit kicked out of him, but he still comes back to save the day at the end. Rating: 3 kryptonite shivs out of 5
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