Woroni Edition 2 2021

Woroni VOL. 71, Issue 1, 2021

WO RO NI

keep on keeping on

WORONI TEAM

CONTENT

TV

Liam Taylor Jack Nicoll Clara Ho Gautham Venkitaramamoorthy Jasper Morse Elinor Johnston-Leek Liah Naidoo Rocky Kim Carys Fisser Oscar Warren Virginia Plas Jacinta Chen

RADIO

Elijah Lazarus Bec Donald-Wilson Fergus Sherwood Rucha Tathavadkar Davis Evans Olivia Adams Gabrielle Karov Alex An Phoebe Barnes Eric Rattray Saaf Khalid

Aditi Dubey Queenie Ung-Lam Aleyn Silva Andy Yin Ashley Davies Fatema Mansuri Katie Sproule Kevin Zhu Rose Dixon-Campbell Sabrina Tse Saskia O’George Tilda Njoo

ART

Eliza Williams Maddy Brown Bonnie Burns Madelene Watson Beth O’Sullivan Navita Wijeratne

NEWS

Ronan Skyring Isobel Lavers Giselle Laszok Sasha Personeni Siobhan Fahey Juliette Baxter Daniel Crane Kristine Giam Fiona Ballentine

CONTENTS NEWS

CREATIVE

Selt Surveys Move From Anonymous to Confidential

And This Window Opens

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Covid Safe Halls

Ode To The Eucalypt

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Between Walls

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Moods

Women’s March 4 Justice Canberra Academic Casualisatoin

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8 COMMENT

The Concern Over Raising 10

Ambition On Fleek

Tutor Staff Reductions See Tutorials Changes to Seminars

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Art Page - Bonnie Burns

Library Cuts Prompt Protests by Frustrated Staff and Students

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The Blue Skies Of Reconciliation

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In Praise of Shadows

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Art Page - Maddy Watson

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CAMPUS

The Social Language of Social Media

A Pandemic’s Guide to Navigating the

Academic Progress

Symposium of Life

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I’m Not a Real Person, Yet

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DISCOVERY

“Everyone’s Job is Difficult

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The Venn Diagram: Mental Health

How to Cope

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and Neurodivergence

The Soup that Got Me Through 2020

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ANU Librarians Face Cuts to Jobs and Hours

Art Page - Maddy Brown 24

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Is Time Travel in 4-D Space Logically Possible?

Personal Reflections on The Uyghur Situation

CULTURE Not Being Brown Enough Seen 11:45pm

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Home (English)

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Home (Dutch(

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Some Fun Tricks to Understand Hindi (English) It is Time For Change

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Cover Art - Sian Williams

Divider Pages - Eliza Williams

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Note From The Editor As we enter into the fourth month of 2021, we are starting to get a better picture of how this year will measure up to our expectations.

The year 2020 was the toxic ex-partner who cheated on you, gaslit you, ghosted you and was just drama all round. This year, we enter into a budding new relationship with 2021 with fewer red flags in our face. The theme ‘keeping on’ was chosen to reflect upon the Coronavirus edition published in May 2020. Living through a public health crisis was not something our parents or the education system prepared us for. Like infants, we had to learn how to take care of ourselves during these unprecedented times.

At times we desperately struggled, other times we were keeping on — trying our very best to continue doing what we have been doing. The Coronavirus edition last year explored ideas of the productivity myth, being in a rut, and relationship challenges. This edition explores many of the same themes, but with more nuance as we mature from last year. These nuances demonstrate not just the silver lining in a crisis, but also consider this edition a celebration of you. I hope that you can see your own personal growth as you flip through the pages that discuss coping mechanisms, soup recipes and more.

For us to keep on 2021 with some semblance of normality speaks to our ability to be better and do better for our own sake. It is with renewed perspective, cautious optimism and a more resilient mindset that I welcome you to the second edition of Woroni for 2021.

Lily Pang, Content Editor

EDITORS Rachel Chopping Editor in Chief

Lily Pang Content Editor

Bernie Callaghan Radio Editor

ard te W tor i rlot Cha ws Ed Ne

B Man en Ro agi wley ng Edi tor

Mat tD TV E onlan dito r

Vy Tsan Deputy Editor in Chief

Sian Williams Art Editor

5.

SELT SURVEYS MOVE FROM ANONYMOUS TO CONFIDENTIAL

By Fiona Ballentine

Students’ qualitative and quantitative SELT Survey responses are moving from being anonymous to confidential, beginning with a pilot program in 2021. According to the ANU, in effect this means the University will be able to identify the individual behind a survey response under “specific circumstances”.

The value of student feedback is indisputable and, according to the ANU, is an integral mechanism for checking course development, academic development, and student fulfilment. This is because students provide a comprehensive, unique insight into how a course’s teaching staff educate and motivate. The University itself states, student feedback directly assists the ANU to comprehend what is performing well and where there is capacity for teachers to make amendments. Beyond this, the ANU’s construction of a culture of feedback indicates to students that the University is interested in hearing and putting into practice their perspective.

According to an ANU spokesperson, the implementation of this SELT Survey pilot program was prompted by a “long and in-depth consultation process”, consisting of discussions with relevant student representatives, in which it was indicated that a transfer to confidential responses is preferred.

When contacted by Woroni, an ANU spokesperson cited three reasons SELT Survey responses will change from anonymous to confidential. First, confidentiality will assist the University in supporting students’ “safety and wellbeing”, by permitting the ANU to follow up with those who reveal they are possibly in harm and to make sure they receive the help and attention required. Second, the ANU believes implementation of confidentiality will allow for greater data analysis which, in turn, will allow the University to better put into effect student feedback. Third, this also means the ANU will be able to investigate and pursue any

necessary action on “inappropriate comments, for example, abusive comments” that violate the Student Code of Conduct.

However, the primary benefit of anonymity is the removal of the power dynamic that exists between the student providers of feedback and the receiving teaching staff of harsher feedback.

Anonymous feedback channels afford students the chance to provide feedback that is sincerely honest, constructive, helpful, and as unbiased as possible. As such, when approached by Woroni with questions regarding any potential measures being taken to ensure students still feel safe to respond with honest feedback without any risk of potential grading reprimand, an ANU spokesperson advised that SELT Survey responses will remain to be delivered to the applicable teaching staff, their manager and the college, and the University executive. Those same ANU staff members will not be permitted to pinpoint the identity of specific commenters from their SELT Survey response.

According to this ANU spokesperson, if a student’s identity must be determined, authorisation will be requested from the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Academic, and with this approval, a “small number of trained professionals” will be in charge of “redacting comments and/or tracing students who made the comments”, and that the ANU “would never publicly release or publish a student’s confidential SELT response”.

Nevertheless, the ANU warns that it is conceivable for teaching staff to be able to recognise students’ identities via the specific feedback that they supply, or because of small class sizes. However, the ANU’s SELT Survey Policy and Procedure require that staff “act ethically” with student feedback, and that if students have any worries about conduct of staff, this should be conversed with the University’s Dean of Students.

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ARTWORK: Sian Williams

COVID SAFE HALLS - ANU’S RESPONSE TO CALLS FROM SR’S

By Sasha Personeni

The University has released a statement attributing the success of its operation amidst the COVID-19 pandemic to the proactive approach of student leaders, highlighting in particular the efforts made by Senior Residents (SRs) in implementing COVID-safe protocols across accommodation halls.

According to the statement, protocols currently in place are under review and will be updated towards a risk versus rules-based approach that will rely on all members of the ANU to behave in a COVID-safe way.

This statement comes as a response to rising stress and pressure expressed by SRs as they have to become the face of the University’s COVID-19 response within residential halls. A key issue raised by SRs is that there exists a tension between providing adequate pastoral care and enforcing COVID regulations. According to one anonymous SR, this renders it difficult to ‘cultivate trust and put forward compliance issues,’ and thus means SR ‘are incentivised not to enforce [covid]

compliance in order to still have a level of trust with our residents.’ Other difficulties presented include enforcing the ‘No guests during O-week’ policy which could present barriers to disclosures and contract tracing, the inconsistencies between COVID-19 guideline enforcement across each hall, and an influx in binge drinking prior to events as a consequence of common space drinking restrictions.

The statement underscored that the University’s ‘broader policies for ensuring the safety and wellbeing of our entire community still apply during the pandemic,’ and that Senior Residents are given support and education to fulfil their important community leadership roles, and announced the organisation of a SR forum to co-design a more risk-based approach to ‘keep their homes safe.’

Senior Residents will also be able to provide advice on how best to support implementation, including determining the right balance of responsibilities between staff and student leaders.

ARTWORK: Sian Williamsv

Library Cuts prompt protests by frustrated staff and students

By Dan Crane, Kristine Li Giam & Giselle Lazsok

On 11/03/2021, members of the university, including library staff, the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) and the Education Officer, protested the ANU’s decision to cut library staff, citing failure on behalf of the University to protect the welfare of its staff and students in the library.

The ANU Education Activism Network and the NTEU have held two rallies in opposition of the library staff cuts, including today’s staff speak-out and a sit-down meeting on March 3rd.

One member who identified themselves as a permanent staff member of the ANU library described their experience. They stated that “almost every day that I’ve been closing, I’ve encountered students racing to the door at three minutes to five begging that we let them quickly race up to grab a book, staring questioningly at a door that won’t open.”

Staff also said that last week, a student tried to hide in the library to stay past 5 pm. “We are forced to push students out who are still using the library and study spaces. We have to interrupt them while they are studying on zoom attending lectures,” said one attendee.

According to the Activism Network, a former library staff member affected by the cuts reported that the standard working week had been cut from 19 hours in Semester 1 2020 to an average of 6 hours in Semester 1 2021. Moreover, most ANU libraries (Chifley, Hancock, Art & Music,

Law, and Menzies) have had their staffed hours cut significantly.

The most recent speak-out protest comes after a survey conducted by the NTEU, which revealed among other issues that 82.5% of ANU library staff had an increased workload in the past year, while 84.2% said they have more work to complete in the same amount of time. The survey also found staff morale was relatively low with respondents placing themselves at 4.8 out of 10. Further, they perceived the morale of fellow staff members a 4 out of 10. It cited issues such as cuts to staff, funding and additional job duties for responders.

At a previous meeting titled “COVID and the Crisis of the Corporate University”, a student activist from the Activism Network raised concerns that the University is turning into a “degree factory” that only “run[s] courses most enticing to businesses and [the] government”. Another student said that universities should be a venue for “expanding collective human intellect” rather than “one overburdened tutor who doesn’t have time to engage with all their students” and “run for profit”.

They were also afraid of Australian universities “turn[ing] into a US-style form of higher education”.

A spokesperson for the ANU has responded to the criticisms stating that “the Library will continue to review needs and opportunities to provide service innovation.”

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Women’s March 4 Justice Canberra

By Juliette Baxter & Kristine Giam CW: Rape, sexual assault and sexual harrassment

March 15th saw hundreds of thousands of ralliers across Australia participate in the Women’s March 4 Justice. In Canberra, protestors filled up the front lawn of Parliament House, demanding better government response to sexual assault and sexual harrassment issues (SASH). Three familiar faces from ANUSA — President Madhumitha Janagaraja, Education Officer Maddie Chia, and Women’s Officer Avan Daruwalla — addressed the crowds in support of the rally.

In her speech, Janagaraja identified herself as “a young disabled woman, as a woman of color, as a survivor, and as a human being who is angry”,

and expressed the need to hold institutions, like Parliament House, to account, because they are not designed to protect victims. She expressed that “our institutions are broken because they are built off the suffering and invisible labour of generations of women” and thus “the system is not on our side”.

Additionally, Janagaraja expressed resentment at how the “burden of evidence [in SASH cases] is consistently placed on [the victims]”. She reiterated the demands of the March, calling for government reform to “hold [their] own representatives to account” and protect “the people and the women that you are elected to serve”. She ended her speech with a quote by feminist poet Audre Lorde:

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“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard nor welcomed, but when we are silent we are still afraid, so it is better to speak.”

of the incumbent government. Nevertheless, in coming forward with her story, Higgins hopes she can protect other women.

Chia and Daruwalla acknowledged that many of the attendees of the rally were themselves survivors and have been let down by the system.

Speaking to Chia after the event, she maintained the importance of taking an intersectional approach in advocating for the prevention of sexual violence.

As student representatives, Chia and Daruwalla have supported student survivors through the traumas of sexual harassment and assault, which they note is a heavy burden falling consistently on the shoulders of young advocates.

The overarching demands of the march were presented in a petition handed to Scott Morrison, including:

A range of other speakers, including journalists, unionists, and community activists, also spoke to the need for change. Ngunnawal elder Violet Sheridan called for an independent inquiry, stating that women need to be safe in Parliament House. Australian Council of Trade Unions (ACTU) leaders Sally McManus and Michele O’Neil emphasised that the fight for women’s safety didn’t begin three weeks ago, but years ago, and that it must consider all workers, including the catering staff and cleaners at Parliament House. McManus and O’Neil also pointed out the role that insecure work has in creating opportunities for the abuse of power by bosses towards women workers.

Lisa Wilkinson, host of The Project and the journalist who reported on the Britanny Higgins story, addressed the politicians implicit in the coverup of the sexual assault, “to those powerful men and women, Brittany Higgins will not be silenced.”

She pointed out the bleak reality that “Parliament House is the easiest place to rape and woman and get away with it” with the deletion of CCTV footage and WhatsApp messages as evidence in the case.

Brittany Higgins, the woman at the centre of the parliamentary rape case, spoke and acknowledged the sad reality of the need for the rally. She said “we are here because we have to be here,” and spoke on the dismally high statistic that one in five women will be raped or sexually assaulted in their lifetime, a number which is even higher for women of colour. Higgins shared how she had been targeted since breaking her silence; and that despite a public apology from Scott Morrison, she and her family had been attacked by members

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Independent investigations into all cases of gender-based violence and timely referrals to appropriate authorities with full public accountability for findings, Full implementation of the 55 recommendations in the Australian Human Rights Commission’s Respect@Work report of the National Inquiry into Sexual Harassment in Australian Workplaces 2020, The ratification of the International Labor Organisation’s Convention on Eliminating Violence and Harassment in the World of Work, The creation of a Code of Conduct for all Federal MP;s that includes the prevention of gendered violence in Parliament and associated workplaces amongst others.

If you or someone you know has been affected by this, please contact one of the support services below: Canberra Rape Crisis Centre, Crisis Line (02) 6247 2525 ANU Counselling (02) 6125 2442 1800 RESPECT 1800 737 732 ANU Women’s Department sa.womens@anu.edu.au ANU Queer* Department sa.queer@anu.edu.au ANU Respectful Relationships Unit respect@anu.edu.au

10.

The Concern over Rising Academic Casualisation: An Interview with Joe McCarthy

By Kristine Giam & Giselle Laszok

Recently, Woroni interviewed Joe McCarthy, a convenor and tutor with over a decade of tutoring experience at ANU, about the concern over rising academic casualisation at the University. In the interview, McCarthy highlighted the sheer growth of expected working hours of casual academics, the damaging impact growing casualisation has on casual tutors, convenors, and students alike, and the inadequate response by ANU.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Joe McCarthy: “Because students’ degrees are usually three to four years and they just don’t really pay attention to the ANU annual reports, go look at the annual education data the Australian government has, you just don’t know how much things have changed.

And things have changed a lot.

If you have a look at the data for ANU, there’s been an increase from about 80 Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs)* in 2009 to 410 FTE in 2019. [One FTE] adds up to about 1725 hours. This is what the government requires them - to just state what the FTE numbers are - but they don’t give us headcount figures [of the number of casual workers] at all. A

way to think about the magnitudes is that you are seeing it increase five fold in the space of ten years.

You just do a simple multiplication and go 80 x 1725 and 410 x 1725 and you can see how many hours in teaching that has increased, and it’s gone up to like 707,922 hours. That just shows the magnitude of the increase, and it’s really quite problematic.”

*Full-Time Equivalents (FTEs) is a unit of measurement used in a way to make work-loads comparable between different contexts.

Woroni: How does the casualisation of academic staff impact casual tutors and convenors?

JM: “This move to academic casualisation could be problematic in a few ways. It’s problematic because it means that they’re cheaper because you’re not having to have long service leave requirements, sick leave, and so forth. But sometimes that can be balanced out with the twenty five per cent loading.

Personally, I don’t think that is the big issue with regards to casualisation.

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The problem is that universities base their pay rates (which are enshrined in the enterprise agreements) on these workload calculations and formulations that were done four decades ago by the Academics Salaries Tribunal. Judith Brett, in that article in The Monthly, discussed that. These Academic Salaries Tribunal [rates are] problematic in a few ways for convenors and the tutors.

So what they say for a convenor is that you must prepare a one hour lecture in three hours, so a two hour lecture in six hours. Now, just think - when you’re speaking for an hour, that’s about 3000 words or so. Just think about that as an essay, trying to do [3000 words] in three hours, but not just writing it, having to research it. You’re having to synthesise all this material and distil it into something coherent, engaging [and] that students are going to respond to. You can’t do it in that time. And I know this because of the hours that I put in. And so that is very, very problematic.

But then you got to think, well, what goes in to adequately prepare for a tutorial, like watching the lectures?

If we’re going to say lectures are important for students, then we should have our tutors watching lectures. Otherwise, I personally think that they are redundant. Then you’ve got to have an hour of doing a running sheet to think about [the tutorial plan] and make sure that’s coherent... then you’ve got also emailing students and having consultations, which students rightfully expect.

However, with consultations and with lecture attendance, the enterprise agreement stipulates that those must be paid as ‘other required activity’, and they never budget for that. So when you as a student see your tutor outside of tutorial time, that is them volunteering their time, they’re not required to do so.”

Woroni: How does this impact students?

And that’s why I argue and I’ve argued sort of in a great general pace that casual convening is indefensible. You just can’t do it. If the university wants to keep it, then they need to acknowledge that at the end of the semester they’re going to get a bill for those extra hours work and they’re going to have to pay if they want to keep it that way.”

JM: “So with tutorial sizes, they have changed a lot in recent years. And I know this first-hand because I’ve been a tutor for a long time since the early 2010s.

The norm for a tutorial [used to be] about 15 odd students. Now it’s gone up to about 23 or more students, and there’s no rational basis for that... it’s not defensible.

Woroni: What has been your personal experience with the issue?

The hours devoted to marking have decreased. I think if we really want to give good feedback, maybe if you get very experienced, then I guess I’ve had the benefit of teaching for ten years.

I’ve kind of got the experience. I can do that. But for first or second year tutors, no, it’s a harder to learn activity that requires investment. But the good thing is if you do invest in it, then you’re going to get quality tutors because they’re going to have that experience from year to year. And there are a lot of these tutors… that tutor for one semester, just saw how much time they were volunteering … what they were experiencing and they didn’t come back and they could have been great tutors, great lecturers.

The reason why I say there’s no real rational basis for the increase in tutorial sites is if you just look at the course fees...in 2019, [courses were] $3000 [per semester] ... If you just add up those numbers, you kind of think, well, where’s your money going?

JM: “I convened a course from 2016 to 2020, Sociology of Third World Development (SOCY2030). In 2016 it would have been over $30,000 in unpaid hours that I put in. In subsequent years where I’d put in those hours, it still was $10,000 dollars that I calculated that I got unpaid overtime. But I could have mitigated that amount, I could have just done the same lectures. But even then, doing the same lectures, you still have to get well versed with the themes you haven’t touched in a year. I just couldn’t bring myself to do that.

For tutors, they say for a non repeat tutorial, that a one hour tutorial can be prepared, administered and engaged in two hours. For a repeat tutorial: one hour delivery and one hour preparation, administration and engagement.

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Now, obviously, universities have non teaching overheads, but the way I see it is that there is more money going into non teaching parts of the university than then there should be. There should be more money going into the front lines of teaching.

But the problem is what the University has done with overseas student revenue [and] domestic students’, their course fees are also subsidising research, [which] means [the University is] paying for people to do research. And so that equates to getting successional staff... of casual academics and casual tutors to... [do] that teaching so you can leave academics to do research. But I think that diminishes the teaching experience for students because students want to be taught by their lecturers. So I think that is very, very problematic.

Woroni: Have you consulted with the ANU with what they are doing? What have they said?

JM: “That’s a good question. That’s what I was actually going to get to. I guess it was a gradual process, but my moment where I thought I need[ed] to talk more about this happened in June or July of last year, after the ACT University Casuals Network did an open letter to the Vice Chancellor Brian Schmidt.

And in his response to us, he did say that he saw casualisation as an issue and [that] it was going to be his signature initiative of his second term to combat it. And I pressed him... last year about this and he talked about how he’s going to have this ‘reconceptualizing casual work initiative’... That was meant to be a pilot programme that was meant to start Semester one 2020 that hasn’t happened yet.

But what we think is trying to happen from statements that Brian Schmidt has made publicly, is he wants to sort of stop the employment of casuals.

That’s a good thing and he should be commended for that... But it’s a problem when you’re getting paid from nine to twelve, but you [are] expected to work nine to five. And so that is ...very problematic.

And I was told I was going to be engaged for the advisory group, [but they] haven’t [responded] to me on that. They haven’t set up the advisory group at all. I’ve been told that they’re doing modelling.

I haven’t seen the modelling yet, but they’re doing the modelling before the advisory group. And I see that as a little bit illogical. Wouldn’t you then canvass the ideas of what’s possible through the advisory group and then go through the modelling

stage to see how that stacks up, how much it’s going to cost the university?...

If we don’t do this, then we’re just going to have the status quo and the status quo is going to get worse... And they’re just not going to put in the work needed to deliver a first class education at ANU. And that’s what the marketing materials say.”

Woroni: Why is the university doing this?

JM: “What’s really important is university rankings and overseas student revenue. And I’m not too sure if you’ve seen the data, but in 2014, overseas student revenue was about 116 million 2014, and that increased to 328 million in 2019. Just think about that, 212 million increase in the space of five years.

Overseas students [will] have a look at the research ranking, which I kind of think, “please don’t do that, have a look at the teaching rankings”. Like that’s the importance, because this whole thing about the teaching research nexus can be a bit of a myth. The rankings are problematic, but [the university] still [is a] slave to them.

You put all that investment into research and then that means that you can get those rivers of gold, but the pandemic showed how unsustainable that business model was. And then there’s other things where you “buy out”** teaching to go for competitive grants. And the problem is that if you go for an Australian Research Council grant or other competitive grants, they never buy out their teaching to the actual hours that it takes to buy out teaching; it’s only the successional hours that you’re buying out.

And if you actually [include] in your grant application the actual amount that it costs to buy out your teaching, then research would be way more expensive…. I strongly believe that the Australian Research Council is getting their research on the cheap. It should be more expensive, and I’m surprised that that’s not talked about as much. ”

** “Buy-Out” Teaching means when an academic is “bought out” by the university to focus on obtaining research grants rather than teach classes. These classes are instead taught by casual academics.

13.

Tutor Staff Reductions See Tutorials Changed to Seminars

By Fiona Ballentine and Dan Crane

The ANU has scaled back its workforce due to the impacts of Covid-19, and has reduced staff numbers, including tutors. As a result, many students are now finding themselves in courses where large seminars have replaced tutorials. These staff reductions have sparked concerns about an overall declining quality of education offered by the University.

The ANU has marketed its student-teacher ratio as “among the highest in Australian universities”, providing more interaction with some of the world’s leading academics. Many other universities face similar staff reductions, and it remains unclear whether this will negatively impact the ANU’s international rankings in the long-term. In his blog, the Vice-Chancellor stated that the ANU expects to see a deficit again in 2021.

When asked what impact the reductions to course tutors will have on the ANU budget, a spokesperson for the University said that:

“It’s difficult to put an exact figure on how many casuals may have had reduced hours during the COVID crisis. Undoubtedly, our current financial situation will see a reduction in the number of casual staff we are able to employ for a period of time.

What we do know is that casual staff account for seven per cent of the University’s salary budget in 2020, a slight decrease from 2019. However, not all of this reduction can be explained by the pandemic as we have been working to provide more ongoing work opportunities for our casual staff.”

Despite COVID-19’s disruption to in-person education in Semester 1, 2020, changes to tutorials were largely not witnessed as, according to an ANU spokesperson, the University proceeded with paying its casual and casual sessional staff when the

pandemic began. Instead, the noticeable impact on tutorial sizes was first felt in Semester 2 of last year, when ANU reduced its workforce size, including its casual academics, of which the University is “sad to see” depart.

In response to anxieties surrounding the quality of tutorials, an ANU spokesperson responded, “ANU remains committed to providing our students with the best education experience possible.

The University continues to deliver tutorials to the same high-standards it always has.”

When approached to provide insight on changes in the quality of education received, some ANU students highly disagreed with the University’s statement, particularly students from the College of Arts and Social Sciences. A student studying International Relations within the College of Arts and Social Sciences said:

“A lot of students, especially international students, are paying a lot of money to attend the ANU, and we expect to receive a quality education, but we are simply just not receiving it. We are being forced to have much larger tutorials.”

Similarly, another student within the College of Arts and Social Sciences reported, “In a lot of my larger, mainstream, core courses, the tutorials are now massive, and when there is a participation mark, it is really difficult to attain, and this is not fair.”

However, ANU students from other disciplines, such as the ANU School of Earth Sciences and College of Engineering and Computer Science, have reported no change in their tutorial sizes.

The ANU’s recovery plan is in full on the ANU website.

ARTWORK: Maddy Watson & Eliza Williams

campus

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ARTWORK: Maddy Brown

A Pandemic’s Guide to Navigating the Symposium of Life

By Satara Uthayakumaran

No doubt over the past few months, you have been bombarded with self-help lessons from 2020; by experts, politicians, leaders and doctors alike. This is unsurprising, given that the events of the past year collectively gathered to become a wise tutor. Ironically, they taught me more than what was mandatorily prescribed for my impending final exams as a Year 12 student. Here are five life lessons— ones which I hope you might have picked up yourself, or perhaps new ideas which I will gladly bestow upon you in this strange but personal manual of life.

One. Do not just “appreciate” but exhibit a tenderness and warmth to those around you. We have been told time and time again that the pandemic has emphasised the true fragility of life and has shown us the intrinsic gift of human connection.

Throughout this period, I was able to appreciate the small nuances of my family, which I otherwise did not observe. My father’s affiliation for black pilot pens, finally learning what mother did in her lab and understanding my sister’s newfound passion

for dramatic theatre. When restrictions were lifted, I visited many of my friends and aunts who were elderly, and was able to sit down, listen and interact with them in ways I had not before. Hear their stories, cook with them and see life from a new perspective. Snail mail suddenly became trendy again, and I discovered a newfound joy in pasting stamps on small envelopes and placing them in the red Australia Post bin to travel to distant suburbs and reach familiar faces.

Two. Enjoy saying “no”. The commonplace “take a risk”, “push yourself” kinds of phrases are typical things we hear, particularly as students. These phrases were turned on their heads when the pandemic hit, and suddenly, taking risks and pushing ourselves took on a different meaning. Whenever I see someone stand on the outskirts of an activity, and simply refuse to do something because they are not comfortable, I mentally applaud them. We often feel that in order to fit in, there is an expectation that we are confident in ignoring our senses and leaping into unknown pockets of life.

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To say no takes enormous courage, and that in itself exhibits a confidence well worth having. For me, saying no looks like sticking to certain values of compassion, empathy and justice, when probed to do otherwise. For me saying no also looks like not playing bubble soccer when everyone else was trying to coerce me, because I was fearful for my life and dignity. Either way, it worked, and I was proud after letting the word leave my lips. Say it with a bit of passion, or a degree of humour. Whatever you choose to do, listen to your instinct, not other peoples’, especially when it comes to things that you aren’t comfortable doing.

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Take long walks (this does not mean uphill). I was lucky enough to stay at two farms over this period, and for the first time understood the meaning of “solitude”. With no-one but the sheep and cows around, I finally “thought”, and listened to myself.

Although the sheep ran away which dampened my self-confidence, I felt strangely comforted and surrounded by the spirits of a nature I had never really interacted with before.hilst this was no Bear Grylls experience, for me, it was enough to evoke senses which had only been engaged during school camps, which I always had a certain distaste for, and because of that regrettably did not see the benefits it provided me with. Even if you are restricted to the suburb of your house, I hope the pandemic has helped you find those small nooks and crannies, little creeks and walking trails which you otherwise did not know were there. Go to those places of silence, and revel in them without worrying about what the next day will bring.

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Become an amateur scholar in every subject possible. In this period, I was determined to get my boating license, even though I have been on a boat less times than I have thought about it. Nonetheless, even though this did not follow through very well, I still obtained my Learners 826 days late, with the support of my friends who accompanied me to the service station where I sat the test. I became a scholar of music, having picked up playing the piano after many years, and it surprisingly brought more comfort to my soul than I thought. I further became a scholar of Religion, Philosophy, Ethics, Scientific Reductionism, Humanism, and conversed with many other scholars including ex-Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams and Bishop Michael Curry,

who famously gave a sermon on love at Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s wedding. Whilst I engaged with my new academic friends, I felt as if I was sitting in the ivory towers of my university apartment and would feel proud of new discoveries I would make.

No one judges or tests you for becoming your own scholar. The bounds of learning are endless when it is just you, a computer and some books.

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Self-care. Suddenly, lockdowns offered us so much more freedom, it was almost frightening. For those of us who constantly ran around, the concept of not having anything to do, evoked a kind of “blues” and anticlimactic ending to a busy period. I for one, had to learn to sit still, and with this newfound time, examined myself, who I was and what I wanted in life. Although this was a fearful period, it was worth it, and I am glad that many of us had the opportunity to stop our frenziness or at least slow down. I personally took time to think about why I did what I did. Was it for my own self-gratification and the fulfilment which came with constantly ‘doing’? Or was it for a more worthwhile reason, as two people I treasure dearly put to me— to impact others in a positive and worthwhile way? I found that doing things for the latter, made me feel more fulfilled than I had before, when I was constantly running around to make others happy. Our worth is not defined by how full our phone calendars are, or how many alerts we receive a day. It’s by what and who your heart chooses to hold. The most important life lesson, ironically learnt from the comforts of my dinner table.

No doubt, there are a plethora of lessons each and every one of you have identified over the past year, but I hope you might be able to take something from the ones I sat through. Love both yourself and those around you. Love both learning and taking time to be alone. It is the ironies of life which make it the beautiful phenomenon that it is.

And whilst we are all enduring a global pandemic, keep remembering that silver linings do appear in unexpected ways.

ARTWORK: Navita Wijeratne 17.

I’m Not a Real Person, Yet

By Karolina Kocimska

The Thursday of O-Week I went out by myself, with the intention of running into some friends and joining them. Living off campus as I do, it is not possible to wander into a common area and find people, and my housemates had their own evening plans. I caught an Uber into Civic and stood in line outside One22, a party of one.

This would have been unimaginable two years ago, in my first year. I was

apprehensive, felt foreign to myself and everything around me. Now, I felt good. Sure, I was getting looks from other groups, specifically ones made up of young men, but it was all mostly harmless, and it had little effect on my mood.

I walked up the all-familiar stairs of old Wolf, bid the bloke I was casually chatting to a good night and lined up for water. It was going to be a sober night.

And so, for the next 40 minutes I drank my water, asked random groups of girls to dance with them and kept my eyes peeled for any friends I could join to appear. I was sober, technically alone, and having a fantastic time. I felt whole, grounded, and confident enough in being a proper, full, and settled person to be able to do this, unlike first-year Karolina.

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Growing older means you settle into yourself. You connect with who you are internally and carve out a little space for yourself among the nearly eight billion people who walk this earth. Your existence becomes your own. You learn to claim it and revel in it, wholly and absolutely.

world as an 18-year-old-- fresh faced, and unable to internally answer if you even like yourself. Everything comes at you all at once, and you walk down Uni Ave feeling like a meaningless speck that is at the same time bursting with a desire to have a space in the world, to be meaningful.

Whenever I tell people I regularly go out sober, they usually respond positively saying “I wish I could do that”. I meet strangers and explain that my friends haven’t come yet, or that they left already, and they are almost always welcoming and friendly.

Through my independent adventures I’ve realised that everyone is searching for connection. Everyone wants to feel comfortable within themselves.

The changes I’ve experienced in my sense of self over the last two years have been beyond what anyone could have explained to me. It’s like the dust has settled, and instead of frantically looking around and being uprooted from the everyday, each foot on the ground is filled with intention and with conviction.

The formative moment occurred after Laneway in February 2020. After a beautiful 10 hours of live music at the Old Mill in Port Adelaide, a friend and I headed into town for the afterparty.

Tiah and I giddily ran up the stairs to Rocket, which anyone from Adelaide will know as a more indie version of One22 and danced the rest of our energy out. She went home at 2 AM and I decided to stay – the DJ was sick, I felt electrically alive and dancing was an expression of truth.

Hence, I stayed, by myself, in a crowd that was already thinning. At first, I just stood by the bar, sipping water, trying to find an inconspicuous corner I could claim. I wandered over, and immediately looped back to the bar. Too scary. I noticed a small group of people dancing like they meant it, I approached, explained that my friend went home, and asked if I could join them. Yes! Welcomed with enthusiasm, I danced with them until 4 AM, until my body gave way, and my energy was spent. I thanked my companions and got home safe.

The moment that I returned to Rocket after seeing Tiah off, I was strengthening my connection to self. When I walked over to those kind strangers, I was affirming my place in the world, and quietly saying “I exist”. When I felt the bass pulsating through my veins and my body moving in time, I was grounding myself in my own existence, taking ownership of who I was and what I stood for. I was becoming a real, full, and settled person.

Nothing really prepares you for the debilitating existential angst of realising ‘holy shit I am an actual person who is meant to have values and thoughts and a proper life’. You enter the

This space you create for yourself is one you must fill, occupy, and take full ownership of.

Doing so requires an understanding of yourself and enough tenacity to claim said space. It’s your little meter-squared surrounded by everyone else’s and a way to affirm your existence amongst them. Your personhood fills your body, transcends it, and grows its roots through the space. I think growing up is the process of making and cultivating that space for yourself. While maybe it always exists, you need to become whole, complete, and full enough so that you can step into it and make it habitable.

I want to get to a point in my life where I only say and do things I mean and believe in. There is a quote in the film Frances Ha, where the titular character Frances says, embarrassed, “I’m not a real person, yet”. I guess my way of living with intention is going out sober and being assured enough to dance with sweaty strangers in the dark. My space is my own, stable enough in its foundations to allow me to stand alone in the line to One22, the perimeter strengthened by my values, goals and confidence that has been through more rejections than approvals.

Becoming a person is scary. It’s a process that you have to completely commit yourself to.

My way of navigating that process was giving up drinking in first year and carrying myself through social situations without the blanket of alcohol. It was journaling, failing two subjects, taking a year off uni and moving back home and doing lots of things alone and then with people. It was learning to smile and say “hi” to the person I kind of knew but whose gaze I always avoided. Your life is your process, and your space is waiting to be yours.

ARTWORK: Beth O’Sullivan

“EVERYONE’s job is difficult.”

Nayantara Ranganatha

I recently came across a TikTok by a primary school teacher. She responds to the weeks of summer vacation that teachers get and how some complain that this makes the profession easier. “I didn’t choose your career for you. Sub for my class one day – just one day! See what I do for 180 days.”

One user commented, “I can do your job for a day. You talk to first graders on a computer… I’m a psych nurse dealing with serial killers. Do my job for a day.” Others responded similarly. The comment section was a battle of professions – people sitting at home, behind their screens, competing to prove

how difficult their work was. The video creator, Miss Franklin, later responded with the following: “What everyone should learn from this trend – EVERYONE’s job is difficult and has their own advantages/disadvantages. Respect one another’s profession.” The whole argument seemed so silly to me. Why was this teacher associating “respect” for a profession with how much others acknowledged its difficulty?

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In our introductory lecture this semester, my Psychology lecturer mentioned that the subject could arguably be considered more difficult than some natural or life sciences. This is because it studies human beings who change their behaviour following new research they read, speculations, and predictions. I learned from my Economics lecturer that famous physicist Max Planck supposedly told John Maynard Keynes that Economics was too difficult for him for similar reasons.

Why are we so fascinated with proving the difficulty of our work? Is it because we need to show that we can do work that is harder than what the ‘average’ person can do, if such a measure even exists? Is this how we channel our yearning to reach our full potential, leave a mark that transcends us, and ‘be special’? After noticing this trend, I began to suspect that the need to prove the difficulty of our work is rooted in toxic hustle culture.

“I am so burned out. I barely slept this week.”

“I’m such a typical stressed college student.

I had to drink a bunch of coffee to cram for my finals.”

“Who says anArts degree is easy. I’ve been studying all day.”

Let’s stop looking at stress and burnout as badges of honour. Let’s stopthe “I’m so overworked, it’s terrible” while secretly feeling hints of satisfaction at the thought that we have “done enough” or done things that are “hard enough” to feel worthy. Let’s stop trying to validate the amount of time or money we have spent on honing our craft by convincing others of its difficulty.

I feel very privileged to have been brought up knowing that my parents will support me regardless of the subject or career I choose. I know not everyone can afford that freedom. We often hear from relatives and family friends who think differently. Some question or look down on my decision to pursue the social sciences instead of a STEM subject. Others assume it is because I didn’t have the skills to do anything ‘better’. In the past, we have gotten caught up in defending our choices and agreeing that difficulty is subjective. All

professions and subjects are difficult, and difficulty depends on each person’s skill set.

Recently, I’ve started realising that by feeding into this discussion, I may subconsciously be contributing to the idea that difficulty matters. Even if there were one objective measure of the difficulty of subjects and professions, would it indicate value?

If being a first-grade teacher was ’easy’, would it be any less important? By protesting against the idea that STEM subjects are more difficult, more valid, or more respectable career choices, I may end up feeding into a culture that assumes that difficulty is equivalent to value or worth. That acknowledging difficulty is somehow equivalent to respect. It is not hard to understand why. Many of us have been conditioned to work harder, put in more hours, and push ourselves to reach our full potential.

We sometimes fall into the trap of assuming that competing in fields that are traditionally considered difficult is the best way to achieve, fulfil, and realise our potential.

The value of a profession and the worth of the human who pursues it does not depend on how little vacation they get or how many hours they have worked overtime. By associating pride with difficulty, we blind ourselves to the fact that our lives are being swallowed by a culture that rewards placing work above all else. Instead of trying to one-up others and glorifying exhaustion, we should start shifting the conversation.

We should redirect our focus to the satisfaction we get after our work has made its desired impact or the fulfilment we feel at the end of the day. We should stop comparing how ‘difficult’ our jobs are and appreciate that teachers are just as crucial as electricians. We should understand the joy that actors bring to our movie nights and thank humanities students for studying the storytellers who have enriched our past. We should thank psychologists and doctors for their contribution to health and still recognize the importance of journalists, homemakers, and museum curators.

Hustle culture, toxic productivity - whatever you want to call it – has dug its roots deep into our conversations, language, and behaviour. By recognising why we say and do things, we could start freeing ourselves from it.

ARTWORK: Navita Wijeratne 21.

How to Cope

By Rose Dixon-Campbell

After living the last few years of my life, there is no doubt in my mind that resilience and coping is a skill. Our strategies are incredibly personal and often will have been refined over many years of turmoil and stress. However, sometimes they won’t always be that deep! Some people’s go-to (mine included) represents an innate instinct we have to protect ourselves. Whether your coping is productive or not, sometimes it’s necessary to indulge, and sometimes it helps to have an outside perspective on how to continue moving through life dealing with stress.

Over the past few weeks I’ve sought out a kaleidoscope of people to discuss this with. Listed below you’ll see the names of good friends of mine, uni peers, kids I babysit, and even my grandmother. Interestingly, everyone had something different to say. I realised for everyone I spoke with, their go-to coping

mechanism reflected something very individual to them. Some of us mentioned escapism, while others preferred to tackle things head on. I hope that when you read this, you’ll see one thing that you hadn’t thought of before, and that that thing will help you even just a little the next time you need it.

My deepest and sincerest gratitude to all those who spoke with me for this article. Without you insightful coping masters, this piece would not have been possible.

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“I really like going for a walk or driving if I’m feeling emotionally overwhelmed and blasting music. If I’m stressed about uni stuff, making lists and talking out my plan to myself helps.”

Sarina, 20

“I like to put in my headphones, listen to music, and walk around the city people-watching.

The big buildings towering over me really puts my problems into perspective. I am strangely comforted by how tiny I am in this big world and this reminds me to not take things too seriously and to just relax and take life one day at a time.”

Anonymous

“I like to read or walk Maggie (my dog) or finish my homework and then do some more reading.”

Sanda, 11

“When I’m feeling depressed, I usually make a plan for allowing myself to feel shitty in a way that doesn’t let me spiral into lying in bed for three days. Firstly, I pick a thing to do that allows me to sit with my emotions, for example making a cup of tea, having a shower, listening to music; followed by a task that will make me feel better like reading a book, putting clothes away or even brushing my hair. I find that allowing myself to feel full and valid emotions within parameters means I’m not suppressing what I feel, but also not letting it control my life.”

Ella, 21

“I like to play on my iPad. I also like to hop in my bed.”

Thu, 9

“Talking to people and talking through things helps me put things in perspective and see that it’s usually not as bad as I think. When you look around, you’ll realise you’re really quite lucky compared with a lot of people around you. For instance, I have reasonably good health and a lot of people my age don’t - that’s something I am happy about and feel grateful for. Also, creative pursuits are therapeutic for me. I like craft work and cooking.

Tea and coffee are relaxing, as is a good gin and tonic.”

Dalma, 82

“It depends on the situation, but I always enjoy having a bath! It just helps me to relax and spend some time being alone and processing my thoughts or how the day went.”

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Maddy, 20

“I am on the autism spectrum, so pretty much any kind of stress I feel, no matter how small, is amplified by a factor of like 50 percent. Stress can really, really shut me down. To try and combat that I have to take myself out of that situation and go to a safe space where I can process everything slowly. I use music, drawing, or even just talking to someone I can trust. For the most part I generally tune out and listen to music in a quiet place where I can collect my thoughts. I use this time to figure out what the actual issue is, and how I’m going to address it.”

Max, 18

“I find taking myself into a different reality helps me cope. For example, quietly reading a novel set in another time or going to see a controversial film with an insightful movie buff (read argumentative!). Ringing a friend that you have not spoken to for a long time is energising, as is going for a brisk walk in cool weather. And don’t underestimate the stress relieving power of animals!”

Anonymous

“If it’s a simple stress I can deal with it pretty well, whether that is by blocking it out or not confronting it at that particular time. I’m more of an expressive person so if it is something a bit more significant then I will seek out somebody close to me to talk to, or listen to music, or maybe stress eat.

Tea and coffee are good too.”

Lauren, 19

“When I’m stressed, I want to sink my teeth into something more story-heavy for a bit of escapism, whether that be a book or a video game.”

Anonymous

“A good cup of tea represents unadulterated luxury and is so soothing in any context. You will always feel at least 5 percent better about any situation after a cup of tea.

Escapism is also very therapeutic. When I need a bit of TLC, I’ll grab my luscious cuppa and sit down with some immersive simulation/role-playing games like Minecraft, Skyrim, or Animal Crossing. Sometimes the best way to cope is just to run away for a bit, and that’s okay.”

Rose, 20

ARTWORK: Maddy Brown

The Soup that Got Me Through 2020

By Rose Dixon Campbell

In fear of being one of those authors who puts their life story in the introduction to a recipe which no one will read, I’ll just say this: potato and leek seemed pretty underwhelming a combo to me when I first heard my coworker rave about this amazing soup. I was wrong to be doubtful though. This soup is creamy, hearty, simple, cheap and can be made vegan! I know what you’re thinking; say less.

INGREDIENTS 60ml olive oil, plus extra for use as you see fit 1 brown onion, diced 1 tablespoon minced garlic (or do 1 fresh garlic clove, minced, if you’re fancier than me) 4 medium desiree potatoes (these are the purpley red ones) peeled and chopped into approx. 2cm cubes 2 leeks, pale section only, thinly sliced 1.25L vegetable liquid stock 125ml thickened cream (optional, really has minimal effect on flavour and texture) + Whatever bread moment you’re vibing right now, toasted or not, to serve SEASONING I personally love to add some fresh, chopped thyme leaves; fresh parsley; and crushed black pepper. Due to the salt content in the vegetable stock, it is usually not necessary to add salt.

METHOD 1. Heat oil in a large saucepan over medium heat. Add onion and garlic and cook, stirring, until onion is translucent and garlic is fragrant. Now is generally also a good time to add other seasonings. Add potatoes and leek and cook, stirring, until leek begins to soften and separate.

2. Add the stock and bring this to a boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat back to medium and let the mixture simmer for 20 minutes or so, stirring every now and then, until the potato is soft.

3. Obtain a blendy tool – this could be a blender, hand-held masher, or any combination/variation of these.

Blend the mixture until it resembles a conventional soup texture. Be thorough in this! No one likes a lumpy soup.

4. [OPTIONAL] At a medium heat, add the cream and stir to combine for 5 minutes.

5. Add any other seasonings you’re really frothing. This is the point where I add pepper – my coworker tells me she adds a drizzle of olive oil. Grab a slice of toasted bread and serve.

The soup keeps pretty well and can easily be made in mass amounts. The ingredients are cheap, easy to come across, and generally represent something you may already have in your cupboard.

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ARTWORK: Maddy Watson

ANU LIBRARIANS FACE CUTS TO JOBS AND HOURS Nick Carlton

You wake up in Chifley library. Who knows how long you have been there, or the last time you ate a meal that wasn’t from a microwave. All you know is that you are cramming for your final exam tonight. You search the front desk and the desolate corridors, but there is not a soul in sight who understands the Dewey Decimal system. You boot up your laptop, but you can’t connect to ANU Secure. Feverishly, you scramble to the IT Help AskANU desk, but instead a message greets you: “for support please log a ticket”. How can you log a ticket when you can’t get online? You pinch yourself awake, but this is not some Kafkaesque nightmare.

This is the Australian National University.

In response to lower-than-expected revenue since the outbreak of COVID-19, the ANU University Council has embarked on a campaign of cuts to courses, staff pay and positions to save costs. Recently come to light are the effects of these cuts to libraries. Library ‘stand-down’ workers, the staff who help us on weekends and evenings, have had their hours cut. One librarian reported that their working week had been cut from 19 hours in Semester One to three hours in Semester Two of 2020. These reductions occurred despite the fact that the staff are employed on a permanent parttime basis, and for many it’s their sole source of income.

Compounding the issue of fewer hours is that there are also fewer staff. As a result of ANU management’s campaign to reduce staff last year, 17 full-time equivalent librarians took Voluntary Early Separations. This semester, the librarians who remain will receive between three and nine hours of work each week. The question is: what happens to all of the important work that librarians at Chifley, Menzies, and Hancock used to do before COVID? Either it is not done, or it is shouldered by staff who bear increased workloads for the same pay over fewer hours.

How did we get here? It may seem that the recent crisis in universities was unpredictable. Our Vice- Chancellor Brian Schmidt wrote in his foreword to the ANU Recovery Plan: “Through circumstances largely beyond our control, our University has been forced to change dramatically.” To the extent that none of us foresaw a global pandemic, this is true. But for years, universities have relied on the hyper-exploitation of international students who are charged three or four times as much in fees as domestic students.

Before anything else, the university is a business. So instead of campaigning for free, publicly funded education, the university system rested on the laurels of its huge profit margins.

Until COVID struck, higher education was the third-largest export in the Australian economy.

Now their complacency has come back to bite Vice-Chancellors countrywide, but it is the staff and students who are being made to pay the price.

The government, for its part, has been callous to university workers, explicitly excluding them from JobKeeper payments. In the last year alone, 17,500 workers in the higher education sector were sacked due to government and universities’ choices.

At some universities, management has exaggerated the scale of the crisis to justify the kinds of restructures (i.e. cuts) they have wanted for years. For instance, Monash University finished the year with a budget surplus of $259 million. ANU has justified its ‘pay freeze’ (due to inflation, really a cut) to staff as a necessary component of making $103 million in annual savings for the next three years. However, ANU aims to have $250 million in liquid assets in case of emergencies such as COVID, casting doubt on whether the quoted figure of $103 million is a genuine deficit. One thing we know for

certain is that ANU is in one of the best financial positions of any university in Australia.

It is not fair to ask hard-working staff, who will soon have little prospect of surviving on welfare, given Morrison will reduce it to below the poverty rate, to prop up ANU’s shareholders with their jobs and their pay. While for any left-wing person, the injustice of this system is blood-boiling, it still raises the question: is there anything we can do? First, we need to recognise that students and staff are on the same team. Staff teaching conditions are student learning conditions.

Secondly, we need to get organised.

Student power doesn’t come from making decisions in boardrooms. It exists only to the extent that we mobilise to make our voice heard. There are several ways we can start making this happen: signing the petition to reinstate our staff, participating in Education Committee meetings, and joining the ANU Education Activists. We need to fight back against university management, not try to appease it. Cutting jobs and hours from our librarians, as well as owning a private vineyard, indicates that Schmidt is no ally of our side. Any campaign to overturn these attacks will need to be centred around protest.

There are examples of students and staff preventing specific attacks. At Melbourne University, management proposed a similar pay cut as the one that was implemented at ANU last year, and it was defeated by a campaign of union organising. a whopping 64 percent of the workforce, that is 5,190 staff of a total 8,069,, voted to reject the cut.

While their victory was exceptional in a year of job cuts, it set an important precedent: it is possible for our side to win. After all, the ivory tower is not an impenetrable citadel: the lecturers, tutors, and administrative staff form the backbone upon which these institutions run.

If students show solidarity with our librarians who are currently in the firing line, there is every chance we can fight for their hours to be restored.

Whether we can overturn these latest attacks remains to be seen, but one thing we know for certain: if we don’t fight, we won’t win.

Nick is part of the ANU Education Activism Network. You can sign their petition

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ARTWORK: Navita Wijeratne 27.

NOT BEING BROWN ENOUGH Anojni Skanthan “You’re Indian, right?”

“No, I am Sri Lankan!”

“Yeah, same thing.”

So, where is Sri Lanka, you may be wondering? Well according to Google, Sri Lanka is located 65km off the coast of South-East India. Sri Lanka has its own distinct culture and geography; hence it is not India. Please stop saying so for future reference. Thank you.

The first six years of my life were spent in this beautiful country. I have fond memories of eating malu paan (fish bun) and chocolate pineapple gateau in my Montessori. With bakeries found on every corner and street, I can guarantee the bestbaked goods probably come from Sri Lanka!

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But like all good things, my time in Sri Lanka ended when my parents decided to immigrate to Australia. As soon as we arrived, we were taken aback by Australia’s weather, as winter was unheard of in Sri Lanka. In Sri Lanka, it is either hot, wet, humid or all of them. While we waited in the airport, we pondered how technologically advanced Australia would be, considering we had just come from what the World Bank considers a ‘developing’ country into a ‘developed’ one. As we roamed Sydney the days following our arrival, the once futuristic vision I had of Australia with flying drones and cloud-touching skyscrapers was shattered. From what I could see, it was pretty much Colombo, except with not as much traffic or cows on the roads. I learnt that Australians like to keep their cows in paddocks near the roads.

But weirdly, I was never homesick since we found a little, quaint Sri Lankan community in Sydney and from my experience, most Australians welcomed us with open hearts and minds. But the real kicker to my sense of self came when my parents decided to move out of Sydney into Canberra, Australia’s National Capital. Here I was, naively thinking that Sydney was the capital. As we drove into Canberra, I remember thinking that there were a lot of trees for a capital. Little did I know that the abundance of trees was trying to make up for the lack of people in Canberra. The first thing I noticed when I arrived in Canberra was that it was run like a country town. Everything was so far away, which was a stark difference to how things operated in Colombo and Sydney, where everything was within walking distance, or at the very least a ten minute bus ride away.

I finally became aware of my surroundings and myself. I quickly noticed that I didn’t have as easy an access to the delicious Sri Lankan food I had been consuming my whole life. To add to this dilemma, my neighbourhood was quite boring, to say the least. Growing up in Sri Lanka, there was always some grand and colourful festivity happening down the street. Fun Fact! Sri Lanka has the second-highest number of public holidays in the world, so you know they know how to celebrate! Anyway, I found it hard relating to kids my age as a diet of Kollywood and Bollywood made me numb to things that kids my age would normally squirm at. Honey, that spider doesn’t scare me! I have seen a man’s head get chopped off on-screen at the age of five.

A couple of years later, panic set in for my parents as they realised that both of their children had forgotten the little Tamil and Sinhalese we knew. In their last attempt to connect us to the motherland, they enrolled us in Tamil school. At first, both my sister and I were not happy as who would want to go to school on the weekends?! But in hindsight, I am forever grateful for that period in my life as not only did I get a little taste of Sri Lanka, but I found friends that understood the struggle of not being brown enough.

When parents of South-Asian descent migrate from their homeland, they generally take an idyllic view of the ideals and values they practised in their country and set this as the standard for how their children should be brought up in the new country. This cultural and generational gap becomes a great breeding ground for an identity crisis (sparkle emoji), creating a disconnect for their children between what’s considered their environment and home. This further leads to feelings of duality, where the children cultivate different personalities to assimilate into their environment, hence feeling like they don’t belong anywhere, i.e. feeling not brown enough.

The thing with trying to conform in such a way is that you tire yourself out rather easily, succumbing to your own negative emotions. But, I have realised that the point was never to fit in, but rather learn from our respective cultures. Both cultures have so much to offer and can live in unison to help you grow into a better version of yourself. For example, through my Sri Lankan heritage, I have learnt the importance of family and spiritual connection as we value the time with loved ones and that we always have faith. This is complemented by the values I have learnt from living in Australia, where the power of camaraderie has shown me how to live a more fulfilling life.

ARTWORK: Beth O’Sullivan

Seen 11:45 PM

By Aditi Dubey

February 14th, Valentine’s Day. It’s almost midnight. I come home after an evening out with friends. Our own little ‘Galentine’s, so that we do Valentine’s the right way by celebrating our friendship. So we ate, then got ice cream, then did some karaoke. A good time, all in all.

I check my phone as I sit down in my room.

I have several unread messages from my friend from back home. She seems kinda annoyed that I haven’t responded.

“Hey sorry, I was out haha. What’s up?”

“Ohhh with friends? Busy celebrating Valentine’s Day?” “With friends lol” “Does Valentine’s Day not ring a bell?”

I frown at my screen, confused. Was I supposed to wish her a happy Valentine’s? Had we scheduled a video call for the 14th that I completely forgot about?

It suddenly clicks, and I smack my forehead.

Then, I smack it again, and a couple more times for good measure. In the panic of my epiphany, I had dropped my phone. I pick it back up and start typing frantically.

“Oh my god.

I’m an idiot.

I feel like the biggest, most heartless, most unforgivably callous fool in the world. She, thankfully, is graceful about it and responds with an “IKR”. I promise to get her cake from Australia. She says it’ll do as an apology.

We talk on the phone for a while. She sends me pictures of her chill, at home, (kind of) quarantine-friendly celebration with a handful of friends. As I browse through them, I feel a small sadness creeping in. It isn’t big, nothing too overwhelming. Just a breeze’s worth of melancholy.

One that lingers instead of just blowing over. Cold enough to make me long for a sweater. It is a familiar feeling.

As we keep talking, other friends come up.

She tells me some of the things she knows about how their lives are going. I make mental notes of my negligence: several other birthdays forgotten, a wedding I couldn’t attend but should have sent my best wishes for, college acceptances and job placements that I definitely should have known more about. A long list that I must attach to an older, even longer one. At this point, it is probably long enough to stretch between India and Australia. Perhaps, I could lay it down and walk across the ocean on it.

But I do not know if that would solve everything. It is easy to blame things on the kilometres between us but maybe the real distance is the one between thought and action.

IM SO SORRY I LOVE U A LOT OKAY MY BRAIN IS JUST DUMB HAPPY BIRTHDAY”

When our call ends, I pull out my post-it’s and mark some important dates on my calendar.

I set reminders on my phone and send out a few messages. Tiny steps. Nowhere near enough to cross an ocean. But, if I take a few more, I will be a little further out, a little more under the sun. Perhaps it will be warmer there.

29.

30.

ARTWORK: Maddy Brown

Home (English)

By Anonymous

Home is a mysterious word. I don’t think anyone could agree on a single definition for it.

Different people understand the word and interpret it in different ways. Is it the house you live in? The place where you feel the safest? The country you feel most connected to? Or is it just simply the country you live in?

lights beam onto the footpath. Tourists find it an intrusion of privacy— I find it lovely.

The sky is bright blue, not a single cloud in sight. At 40,000 feet, flying over the Black Sea, I feel at peace, at rest from life’s troubles whilst quite literally sitting in an inescapable object. I’m flying back home, to Australia. However, mentioning the word home gives me a sense of unease.

New Year’s Day is a celebration in itself - wishing strangers a happy new year, the smell of fireworks still fresh in the air, finishing the final celebratory foods before they become irrelevant.

‘Big Sale’ signs dangle in shops celebrating the start of the new year, bicycles flood the street, friends and family visit as many people as possible in one day, the feeling of happiness fills the air. While the temperature makes my body shiver, the sense of community gives me a powerful feeling of joy and happiness, making me feel at ease.

Is Australia really my home?

My mind drifts back to the holiday I had just been on. The Netherlands was as sublime as ever, enticing me to give it all my attention. The crisp, cold winters fill me with joy and are always a highlight. The cold temperatures offer me a sense of contrast to the sluggish heat of the Australian summer. As the European sun rises, signalling the start of a new day, the work of the previous nights’ freezing temperatures is revealed. Once a vivid green, the grass now seems like a foreign, introduced species, full of a dull white layer of ice that reminds me of the spiderwebs in Australia.

Smells rich and diverse fill the streets, ruffling my nose. Open curtains reveal families having breakfast, brightening up the whole street as the warm house

I feel at home, but what is home?

Memories from my early childhood echo in my mind. Whole streets decorated in orange, as the national football team competed against the world, it felt as if the whole country was part of the team, with occasional chants and angry shouts flooding onto the footpath. Juggling the football in the street with neighbours, scurrying to safety when a car approaches, occasionally throwing snowballs at them, hurrying behind the trees to hide. Collecting stickers at the supermarket, trading with friends, racing to finish the collection book first. Monthly family gatherings at the local Chinese buffet, constantly eating food with my cousins, our parents warning us not to get sick. All stolen away when, at five years old, I moved to Australia.

Curiously, I look up the definition for home; “the place or region where something is native or most common”. This resonates with me for a while, but can one definition evoke meaning to such a powerful word? One person’s home may be different from another’s. The word requires deep thoughts and self-reflection.

is perhaps as important as ever. Cautiously, I hold both my passports, almost creating a balance scale. Which one am I prouder of? Which one has a greater weight in my life? Both have had a tremendous impact, but does one prevail? I am often asked what country I am from. I instinctively, immediately reply with ‘The Netherlands’.

I’m flying back to Australia, all the way to the other side of the world. Separated by 16,000 kilometres, it is almost a world on its own. I moved there when I was five. I’ve spent more than half of my life there, yet an absent feeling fills the air. I struggle to have a connection. My place of birth, this country has had a big influence on my life. Waking up on a hot summer morning I always agonise. The house is already filled with humid hot air, there’s not a moment of relief. Fans working overtime to provide some sense of treatment, but to little avail.

People trudge along the street, hoping to get some fresh air before the heat becomes too much. The sun beams bright, creating a sea of bright colours wherever you look. People flock to water sources, desperately searching for relief, the local shopping centre provides endless air conditioning – some may say there’s no better place to be. The cricket fills TV screens, while the Barbeque works endlessly to provide summer feasts. Australians will take advantage of summer in any way possible. Tourists will find it unbearable – I find it lovely.

A sense of emptiness fills me when I think about what country I truly belong to. Instinctively, I know it’s not the country I live in.

Vividly, I remember my first day of school.

There was no one I could call my friend. This country was still strangely unfamiliar to me. Yet today, I can truly laugh at myself when talking to my friends about that first day. My first club football game was played here, and I was filled with joy when I hit a six to achieve my first half century in the national sport, cricket. Wild summers will never escape me, layers of smoke engulfing everything, the whole community coming together to protect our land.

Bike rides with friends were in the bush as opposed to the Dutch streets, weaving in and out of the giant gum trees, the smell of eucalyptus too strong for my nose. I feel a sense of luck when I say I live in Australia, but can I come to the conclusion that it is my home?

Your identity is often linked to place. One glance at a passport can reverberate into lasting stereotypes for someone you perhaps have never even met. In today’s hypervigilant world, our identity

‘Down Under’ it’s called, ‘The Great Southern Land’. Yet its charisma, so appealing to many, grapples with my inner self. I feel a lack of identity and I wonder, am I overthinking the concept of home? But no, our homes are more than a financial asset – they have an immeasurable emotional meaning. In Australia, never have I been able to share memorable moments with family or celebrate events with the whole country. But what about Skype or FaceTime? It isn’t the same.

Creating memorable moments can’t be achieved with a simple call, it requires physical presence.

What about Australia Day? People celebrate that, right? Yet somehow I don’t feel a connection. Not even remotely does it compare to Kings Day, during which I feel a real, strong connection. Celebrating the birthday of our king with the whole country is truly an amazing feeling, streets filled with orange, singing our anthem with pride while feasting on Dutch delights.

“Welcome to Sydney airport, we do hope you enjoyed your flight and to all Australian residents, welcome home”.

I feel that welcome, but am I home? I am physically back on Australian land, no longer on the stateless airplane, but my sense of identity is still unclear. I know that one day I might have to come to a decision between the two nations, but for now, I accept that I have two homes. Both the Netherlands and Australia have a deep place in my heart.

Home is a deeply under-considered word.

Yes, you may relate it to a place of living, but the concept is far deeper. It’s not all about the physical aspect. One thing is for sure - whenever you feel at home, there is no better feeling possible.

31.

32.

ARTWORK: Maddy Brown

Home (Dutch)

By Anonymous

Thuis... wat een mysterieus woord, ik denk niet dat het woord een mening hebt die iedereen mee eens kan zijn. Het kan zo veel verschillende dingen betekenen. Is het waar je woont? Het land waar je een connectie mee voelt? Of is het gewoon het land waar je woont?

De lucht is helderblauw, geen enkel wolk in zicht. 40,000 ft in de lucht, ik vlieg over de Black Sea, en ik voel me tot rust, weg van alle problemen en vrij letterlijk in een ontsnapbaar object. Ik ben opweg terug naar huis, Australia. Maar, als ik het woord ‘huis’ zeg krijg ik een raar gevoel.

Is Australia echt mijn thuis?

Mijn hoofd gaat terug naar de vakantie die we net hadden. Nederland was mooier dan ooit.

De knapperig koude winters brengt plezier naar mij, het is altijd een hoogtepunt van de vakantie.

De lage temperatuur biedt een contrast tot de warme Australische zomers. Als de Europese zon opkomt, het werk van de vriezend temperatuur van de nacht daarvoor zie je pas voor het echt. Toen een heldergroen, het gras is nu onherkenbaar, een laag van ijs er op moet me denken aan de spinnenwebben in Australia. Geuren vullen de straten, als of mijn neus met mij speelt. Open gordijnen laat families zien, lekker aan het ontbijten, echt iets Nederlands denk ik. Toeristen zouden het een lack of privacy vinden, ik vind het geweldig.

Nieuwjaarsdag is altijd een feest in zichzelf.

Iedereen een ‘gelukkig nieuw jaar’ wensen, zelfs vreemde mensen die je tegenkomt in de straat, de geur van vuurwerk nog fris in de lucht. Nog lekker snel wat eten van nieuwjaarsavond voordat we weer een jaar moeten wachten. Veel fietsers kom je vandaag tegen, iedereen terug naar huis naar een lange avond. Of misschien nog snel een paar vrienden of familie opzoek gaan, een voel van geluk is in de lucht, wat een mooi gevoel.

ik?

Ik voel thuis, maar wat eigenlijk is thuis denk

Herringen van mijn opvoeding komen terug. Straten helemaal in oranje. Oranje speelt vanavond, iedereen vol met hoop en spanning.

Het voelt alsof het hele land het twaalfde man is, zingen en schreeuwen voor ons land. Lekker een potje trappen naar de wedstrijd was altijd leuk, snel wegrennen als een auto er aan kwam. Soms stiekem een sneeuwbal gooien naar de auto’s, en snel achter de boom verstoppen. De voetbal stickers bij Albert Heijn verzamelen, wisselen met vrienden, zo snel mogelijk het boekje klaar hebben. Lekker naar de wok met de familie, altijd veel eten halen, onze ouders ons waarschuwen om niet ziek te woorden.

Al die leuke dingen, weg, toen ik 5 was, naar Australia verhuisde.

Ik ben best wel benieuwd naar de woordenboek mening van het word ‘thuis’. “Woning waar je woont en waar je je prettig voelt”. Ik denk hierover na, kan eigenlijk een mening genoeg zijn voor zoon ingewikkeld woord? Voor een iemand zou dit genoeg zijn voor het woord, maar dan weer niet voor een andere. Het woord moet je veel over nadenken.

Ik vlieg terug naar Australia, helemaal aan de andere kant van de wereld, meer dan 16,000km vanuit elkaar, alsof het een andere wereld is. We zijn daarnaartoe verhuist toen ik 5 was, dus heb meer dan de helft van mijn leven daar gewoond, maar het voelt nog steeds raar, ik voel gewoon geen connectie met het land. Ik ben hier zelfs geboren, het land heeft een groot invloed op mijn leven gehad. Wakker woorden in de warme zomers was altijd erg, het huis al gevuld met warme vochtig lucht geen moment van koelheid. De fans werken amper, alsof ze het ook te warm hebben. Mesen lopen langzaam door de straat, hopen dat ze nog snel wat frisse lucht krijgen voordat het te warm wordt om naar buiten te gaan. De zon is helder en creëert een zee van kleuren overal waar je kijkt.

Mesen zoeken water op, als ze maar wat cooling krijgen. Veel mensen gaan naar het winkelcentrum, wat heb je daar? Air conditioning...... De cricket is bijna op elk tv-scherm die je langs komt en de barbecue ruik je in elke straat. Je merkt echt dat Australiërs in super veel manieren gebruik maken van de warme zomers, toeristen zouden het niet aan kunnen. Ik vindt het indrukwekkend.

Ik weet nog goed mijn eerste dag op school in Australia. Niemand was mijn vriend en het land was nog behoorlijk raar voor mij. Maar nu, 13 jaar later, kan ik er wel om lachen, als ik met mijn vrienden daar over praat. Mijn eerste voetbalwedstrijd was in Australia en ik weet nog goed toen ik een ‘six’ kreeg en een 50 tijdens een cricketwedstrijd. Wilde zomers zullen me nooit ontsnappen, lagen en lagen rook overal waar je kwam, het hele land kwam samen om het land te redden. Lekker fietsen met mijn vrienden in ‘the bush’ in plaats van de kleine Nederlandse straten, langs de gums trees, ertussen door racen, de geur van eucalyptus te sterk voor mijn neus. Ik voel me eigenlijk best wel gelukkig als ik zeg dat ik in Australia woon, maar het lukt mij nog steeds niet om te zeggen dat het mijn thuis is.

Je identiteit is vaak gekoppeld met een land. Een blik naar iemands paspoort en er komen meteen stereotypen naar boven. Vooral in vandaags hypervigilant wereld is iemands identiteit misschien nog belangrijker. Voorzichtig, hou ik mijn Australian en Nederlandse paspoort in mijn handen, als of ik ze op een weegschaal zet. Welke ben ik meer trots op? Welke is belangrijker in mijn leven? Alle twee hebben ze een groot betekenis voor mij. Maar is een groter? Vaak word ik gevraagd welk land ik vandaan komt, “The Netherlands” zeg ik altijd.

Ik voel leeg als ik erover na denk welk land ik eigenlijk vandaan kom. Instinctief zegt dat het niet het land is waar ik woon.

“Down under” wordt het genoemd. “The Great Southern Land”, maar al dat ‘charisma’, zo aantrekkelijk voor zo veel mensen grijpt met mijn ‘inner self’. Ik voel eigenlijk amper een identiteit, of misschien denk ik gewoon te veel voor dat woord.

Maar nee, thuis is meer dan een gebouw dat veel geld waard is. Ze hebben een emotionele mening.

In Australia heb ik nooit een leuk moment met mijn familie kunnen delen. Ze wonen hier niet..... Maar Skype en FaceTime denk je misschien, dat is anders.

Je kan niet herinneringen maken via een video call, het moet een fysiek onderdeel hebben. Ook heb ik nooit met het hele land dingen kunnen vieren.

Australia Day dan? Denk je misschien. Maar nee, ik voel echt geen connectie. Het komt nieteens dichtbij in vergelijk met koningsdag. Alle straten oranje, de verjaardag van onze koning vieren. Het Wilhelmus met trots zingen, en lekker eten.

“Welcome to Sydney airport, we do hope you enjoyed your flight and to all Australian residents, welcome home”

Ik voel dat welkom, maar ben ik echt thuis?

Ik ben sowieso fysiek terug in Australia, niet meer in het neutraal vliegtuig, maar mijn identiteit snap ik nog steeds niet. Ik weet dat misschien en dag komt wanneer ik moet beslissen tussen de twee landen, maar voor nu accepteer ik dat ik twee huizen heb.

Australia en Nederland.

Thuis is echt een moeilijk woord, ja, het kan gewoon het huis zijn waar je woont, maar de mening van het word is veel dieper. Een ding weet ik zeker, er is geen beter gevoel dan om thuis te zijn.

33.

34.

Some Fun Tricks to Understand Hindi (English) Nitya Narasimhan Sorry for the interruption. I’m about to

An entertaining way of learning Hindi is to

barge in with my Hindi language train onto your

watch Bollywood movies. If you know how to read

English language train, asI thought there was no

Hindi, then you can watch the movie with Hindi

better place at ANU than Woroni to show up.

Subtitles. Otherwise, simply watch the movie and

I have heard that some students are learning Hindi at ANU, and that there are also people who simply want to improve their Hindi speaking and writing skills. So I’ve decided to write about a few fun and easy tricks to learn Hindi to make your language learning journey easier.

First of all, Hindi does not have any silent letters. The way you write Hindi is the way you speak the language, and the way you pronounce a word is exactly the way you write it. Hindi is a very phonetic language, so it’s easier if you say the words out loud while reading in Hindi. People often get confused between a few alphabets in Hindi, namely the ‘उ’ and ‘ऊ’, and ‘इ’ and ‘ई’. When using these similar alphabets, always pay attention to how you are pronouncing each alphabet. When pronouncing ‘उ’ (oo), if you stress on the word as in the case of the Hindi word for

try to understand the dialogue. If you are new to Hindi, you can watch movies traditionally made in the English Language (or the language you are most comfortable using), that you have already seen, but this time subtitled in Hindi. This is helpful because you are already aware of the context in which the actors are conversing, so it’s easier for you to understand what they’re saying.

You can also listen to songs in Hindi, as some people find it easier to memorize or remember words if they are in the form of a song.

In order to master any language, it’s important to keep practising it. Keep talking in Hindi to your peers or with other people at ANU who are familiar with the language. Apart from Google (Google translate is not always accurate), there are other apps which can help you learn Hindi, such as Duolingo. You can also watch videos in Hindi that are made for kids on YouTube

‘up’ (‘ऊपर’), you are using the larger form (‘ऊ’). If

to familiarise yourself with the basics of the

you don’t stress on the alphabet, you use the

language.

smaller form (‘उ’), as in the case with the Hindi word for ‘owl’, (‘उल्लू’). The same goes for the letter ‘इ’ – for example when pronouncing the Hindi words ‘इमारत’and ‘ईदगाह’ (where the bigger form ‘ई’

These are the only tricks up my sleeve to learn Hindi but you definitely shouldn’t stop here.

Keep conversing in Hindi, read Hindi books, watch Hindi movies and listen to Hindi songs. Learning a

is used), meaning a building and the festival Eid

new language does not only make it easier to

respectively. In Hindi, a lot of people are also

make new friends but it builds your self-

confused when using the Hindi term for that and

confidence and it’s a good feeling to know a

when saying someone’s, as both are pronounced

language previously foreign to you. That’s all from

as Ki in Hindi. When it comes to writing, ‘िक’ means

me, I hope you keep learning and I hope to see

‘that’ while ‘की’ is used to say Nitya ki Kitab (Nitya’s book) – an act of possession (someone’s book).

you soon!

35.

आइए िहंदी सीखने के िलए मजेदार तरीके दे खें। - िनत्या नरिसम्हन

रुकावट के िलए खेद है। आपकी अंग्रेजी के पटरी पर यह िहं दी भाषा की रेल को चढाने के िलए माफ़ कीिजयेगा, परन्तु मेरे मुँह िदखाई के िलए वोरोनी (Woroni) से अच्छा माध्यम कहाँ िमलेगा मुझे ANU में।

मैने सुना है िक ANU में भी कई छात्र िहं दी सीखते हैं और कई ऐसे छात्र भी हो सकते हैं िजन्हे अपनी िहं दी सुधारनी हो। तो मैंने सोचा क्यूं ना िहं दी सीखने के िलए थोड़े आसान नुस्के बताए जाए तािक बच्चों को िहं दी सीखने में आसानी हो और मज़ा भी आए।

पहले तो िहं दी में कोई भी मोन अक्षर (साइलेंट लेटसर्) नहीं है। िहं दी को जैसे िलखते हैं वैसे ही पढ़ते हैं और जैसे बोलते हैं वैसे ही िलखते हैं। िहं दी एक बोहुत ध्वन्यात्मक (िफनेिटक्स) भाषा है। तो जब आप िहं दी पढ़ें तोह शब्दों को ज़ोर ज़ोर से बोलकर पढ़ें और जैसे िलखा है वैसे ही पढ़ें। अक्सर लोगों को ‘उ’ और ‘ऊ’, और ‘इ’ और ‘ई’, में दुिवधा होती है तोह आप ध्यान दीिजए की आप शब्द बोलते समय उस अक्षर को कैसे बोलते हैं। अगर आपने ‘उ’ पर ज़ोर िदया तो वोह बड़ी ‘ऊ’ होगी जैसे ऊपर जहां आप ‘ऊ’ पर ज़ोर देते हैं जबिक उल्लू में आप ‘उ’ पर ज्यादा ज़ोर नही देते। ‘इ’ और ‘ई’ का भी ऐसे ही पढ़ सकते हैं जैसे इमारत और ईदगाह। िहं दी में काफी लोगों को िक और की में भी दुिवधा होती है। िक यानी अंग्रेजी में डेट (that) और की यानी िकसी की चीज जैसे िनत्य की िकताब (possession- Nitya's book)।

अगर आपको िहं दी सीखना है तो बॉलीवुड चलिचत्र (िफल्म) देखना एक बोहुत मजेदार तरीका है। आप िहं दी िफल्म देख के िहं दी समझने की कोिशश कर सकते हैं। अगर आपको िहं दी पढ़ना आता हो तो आप उस मूवी को िहं दी अनुशीषर्क (सबटाइटल्स) के साथ देख सकते हैं। जो लोग िहं दी से ज्यादा वािकफ नहीं हैं वो िहं दी में डब िकया हुआ अंग्रेजी चलिचत्र (या आपका रािष्ट्रक भाषा का चलिचत्र) देख सकते हैं जो आपने पहले देखा हो तािक आप उस चलिचत्र के कहानी को पहले से ही जान सके और आपको वे अिभनताओं की बोली समझ आए। या आप अंग्रेजी अनुशीषर्क के साथ िहं दी में िफल्म देख सकते हैं। िहं दी गाने भी आप सुन सकते हैं क्योंिक धुन इं सान को ज्यादा जल्दी याद होती है।

िकसी भी भाषा को बेहतर जानने के िलए आपको उस भाषा में अक्सर वातार्लाप करना चािहए। आपके साथी जो िहं दी सीख रहे हैं आप उनके साथ या ANU में जो बच्चों को िहं दी आती है आप उनसे िहं दी में बात कर सकते हैं। गूगल (Google) के अलावा (ध्यान रिखएगा िक गूगल ट्रांसलेट हमेशा सही नही होता है), ऐसे कईं ऐप (app) हैं जैसे डु ओिलं गो (Duolingo) िजन्हें इस्तेमाल करके आप अपनी िहं दी सुधार सकते हैं। यूट्यूब (YouTube) पर आप छोटे बच्चों के िलए िहं दी में बनाई गईं वीिडयो देखकर भी सीख सकते हैं।

36.

It is time for change

By Saskia O’George

Japan has a deep history of gender inequality. Unfortunately, this history continues to this day, with many women struggling to succeed in the workforce. Each year, the World Economic Forum analyses data from four areas: economics, politics, education, and health which together assess the progress of gender equality in each country. According to the 2020 report, Japan ranked 121st out of 153 countries, and in 2019, Japan ranked 110th out of 153 countries. What is required for gender equality to prosper in Japan? How can we challenge Japan’s sexist ideology to stop “keeping on”?

To understand why gender inequality exists so strongly in Japan, I first want to clarify the history that has underpinned this social ideology in Japan.

Japan has historically been a matrilineal society, but when Confucianism emerged during the Edo period, male rule and hierarchy reduced the power of women in society. This marked the beginning of the “family system”. Similar to the role of gender in Western history, the “family system” refers to women completing household chores and men working to support their families. This has significantly influenced many aspects of life for Japanese women. For example, the new role of women was to give birth to children, in particular male children, and to serve their husbands (author’s note: gross). As Japan introduced the “family system” much later than many developed countries, it’s understandable that gender inequality continues in Japanese society. Understandable does not mean excusable.

So, how has Japan’s history manifested in society today?

I found a report describing a concept known as “endurance”, written by a foreign

worker in Japan. “Endurance” is the idea that you should carry on with a smile, even if it makes you uncomfortable. The meaning behind the word “endurance” makes me sad about my future working in Japan. In Western societies, people are taught to share their opinions loudly and freely. I think a core cause of the sustained gender inequities in Japan is the suppression of personal opinions.

Japan has a long way to go before gender equality becomes the norm. In 2013, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe announced a national goal called the “Womenomics Strategy,” which stated by 2020, women should hold 30 percent of the corporate leadership roles in Japanese companies, yet when 2020 arrived, women held only 5percent of these roles. Japan has not seen rapid success, but I think things can change.

I believe there are many ways for women to be recognised and empowered in Japan. Many reports conclude that Japan’s gender inequality problem will be resolved by focusing on increasing the proportion of women in politics. Currently, according to BBC News, only 10 percent of members in Japan’s House of Representative are women. The more women participate in politics, the more women will be able to fight for their rights in Japan.

In Japan, there are many unconscious prejudices and social expectations based on traditional gender roles. If the issue of gender inequality remains the same, Japan’s future is unlikely to be bright. If women stand together and speak up about the gender injustice in Japan, we will no longer have to keep on keeping on with gender inequality .

変化の時 ⽇日本には、男⼥女女間の不不平等の深い歴史がある。残念ながら、この歴史は今⽇日にまで⾄至り、⼥女女性は 労働⼒力力で成功するために、奮闘し続けている。毎年年、世界経済フォーラムは経済、政治、教育、 健康の４つの分野のデータから分析されて、各国のジェンダー平等の進展を評価している。2020 年年のレポートによると、⽇日本の順位は153か国中121位で、しかも２０１９年年に⽇日本の順位は153 か国中１１０位だったと⾔言う。⽇日本に男⼥女女共同参画が繁栄するためには、何が求められるだろう か。⽇日本の性差別的イデオロギーに「続けている」ことをやめるようにどうやって挑戦すること ができるでしょうか？ ⽇日本にジェンダーの不不平等が存在する理理由を理理解するには、始めに、⽇日本でジェンダーを取り巻 くイデオロギーを⽀支えてきた歴史を明らかにする。⽇日本は歴史的に⺟母系制の社会だったが、江戸 時代に儒教が興った際に、男性の⽀支配と階層は、社会で⼥女女性の⼒力力を低下させた。これが「家制度」 の始まりを示した。⻄西洋史でジェンダーの役割と同様に、「家制度」とは、⼥女女性は家事をしたり、 男性が家族を⽀支えるために働ったりすることを⾔言う。これは⽇日本⼈人⼥女女性の⽣生活の多くの⾯面に影響 を与えた。例例えば、⼥女女性の新しい役割は、⼦子供、特に男性の⼦子供を産み、夫に仕えることだった。 ⽇日本は多くの先進国よりもはるかに遅れて、「家制度」を紹介したので、⽇日本社会でジェンダー の不不平等がどのように続いているかを理理解するのは簡単だと思う。理理解できるということは、⾔言 い訳ができるという意味ではありません。 では、今⽇日の⽇日本の歴史はどのように社会に現れているのでしょうか。 ⽇日本⼈人の外国⼈人労働者が書いた「我慢」の概念についての報告を⾒見見つけました。「我慢」とは、 あなたは不不快にさせても、笑顔で耐えるべきだという考えだ。「我慢」という⾔言葉の意味は、⽇日 本で働く⾃自分の将来を悲しく思う。⻄西洋社会では、⼈人々は⼤大声で⾃自分の意⾒見見を共有するように教 えられています。⽇日本のジェンダーの不不平等の⼤大きな理理由は個⼈人的な意⾒見見の拒絶だと思う。⽇日本 は、ジェンダーの平等が当たり前になるまでには⻑⾧長い道のりがあります。 2013年年、安倍晋三⾸首相 は「ウーマノミクス戦略略」と呼ばれる国家⽬目標を発表し、2020年年までに⽇日本企業で⼥女女性が企業の 指導的役割の30％を割りたが、それから、2020年年には、⼥女女性はこれらの役割の5％しか割りてい なかった。⽇日本は急速に成功していませんが、変化はあり得ると思う。

⼥女女性が⽇日本で認識されて、地位を⾼高めるには、さまざまな⽅方法があると信じる。多くの報告は、 政治における⼥女女性の割合の増加を中⼼心に⽇日本のジェンダー不不平等の問題を解決するの結論づけて いる。現在、BBCニュースによると、衆議院議員の10％だけが⼥女女性だを⾔言う。より多くの⼥女女性が 政治に参加すれば、するほど⼥女女性の権利利のために戦うことができるでしょう。 ⽇日本で、伝統的なジェンダー役割に基づいた無意識の偏⾒見見や社会の期待が多いだ。ジェンダーの 不不平等の問題が変わらないものなら、⽇日本の未来は明るくなさそう。⼥女女性が⼀一緒に⽴立ち、⽇日本の ジェンダーの不不公正について発⾔言すれば、私たちはもはや 「続けている」 必要はありません。

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Sisana Lazarus

And This Window Opens

ARTWORK: Maddy Watson

I’ve been staring out this window my entire life I see the same people and hear the same sounds Blending into one beautiful terrifying shape Breathing and sweating and crying Waltzing in time with each beat of the day The mechanical stream of what is and what isn’t The blood and the veins of a living picture show Peering into me as I try to contain it This window never cracks Although it may dirty For months at a time without a polish Where the figurines have no faces And the hymns they sing are anguished Where the sun runs away And the sky is unfinished The motions go on Against better judgement As I swim into my twentieth year The window opens More than ever before And the beings and trees are angrier Yet so loving and warm and tender This window endures To scold and to liberate Embracing all grace and imperfection Beyond the fragile prison of my mind

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ARTWORK: Navita Wijeratne

By Rose Dixon-Campbell

Ode to the Eucalypt

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Swaying gently, Solidly moored by a vast civilisation of roots below.

Generations of growth and decay, Growth and decay.

Life goes on for the Eucalypts.

Slivers of bark Suspended by svelte branches.

Slender limbs macabrely examine their former skin.

An ashen pallor to the trunk, Smudged shades of grey and green and blue and white By the brush of Albert Namatjira.

The ghost gum stands tall and straight on this plane and in the next.

For want of water, nurture and relief, Pines and Firs and Oaks will wither and crumble Under the golden sun in the red dirt of the Lucky Country.

Far from home.

Something so pale and so spindly Should succumb to the will of the colonisers.

Nature should bend to man’s will.

And yet in my lifetime and the next, the Eucalypt is well rooted.

ARTWORK: Bonnie Burns

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ARTWORK: Bonnie Burns

Between Walls Author: T.N

A girl imagines she could jump.

Despite a window in place, and four metres of space.

Still, she imagines.

Above her,

the noise is Leaking.

Through his head phones he can hear it.

It’s not quite a buzz he can hear it even though it’s not quite a buzz and He’s wearing his headphones and it’s leaking.

The girl adjacent wants you to Please excuse the pun.

As she speaks, the room cannot find the pun.

Yet, The room does not exist but for his eyes, Thinks a boy as he lets his hand fall, between their two chairs.

The man in the corner pulls at his hair because he is looking at the girl looking at the window imagining she could jump.

ARTWORK: Navita Wijeratne 43.

Moods

By Delilah Isherwood Critchley

Mum doesn’t knock as she enters my room.

I wasn’t dreaming. Dreams seem to run away from me, as if I don’t deserve them. My eyes slowly open, blurry at first, but then revealing the comforting surroundings. I don’t want to get up, not for another Wednesday. Mum complains about the clothes on the floor; the contents of my open drawers overflowing like waterfalls after rain. I grumble the same lie I state every morning: “I am awake”. Mum leaves to get dressed but the scenario repeats itself until I’m up. Finally, dressed and ready for school, she drives me to the gates. I know I’m late, Mum knows I’m late, but thankfully she decides not to mention it. She does ask, however, if anything is wrong but I just shrug, knowing exactly what is pressing on my chest.

Two weeks until my creative writing assessment is due… 14 days… Soon to be 13.

Love, honour, pity, pride, compassion and sacrifice.

Important themes to write about. But what do I know about any of them? ‘Explicitly inspired’. What does that even mean? I explicitly don’t want to write this. No wonder I am biting my nails so much.

I have lived in the North Shore all my life, cloistered in the bubble of privilege that my private school and wealthy parents provide. Sacrifice doesn’t feature in my life. I have compassion, honour, pity, pride, and love, but is it enough?

No, of course not. I am only 17, I have barely experienced the world. Sure, I have seen poverty on a screen, studied it in geography, felt the brief tug at the heart that is pity, but not the gut-wrenching emotion that makes you short of breath. Does pity even affect your breath?

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I could write about love. Even, I think, bullshit some bitter-sweet romantic piece. My love for the ocean, my love for surfing — the love I felt for the boy that influenced me to surf. How every time I duck dive under a wave, the water surrounding me relaxes my brain and fixes my craving for the ocean. How every time I resurface, I feel re-birthed, as if I’m taking my first breath of a new life. The adrenaline high of catching a wave supplies the rush most of my age crave from alcohol. I could write how every time I daydream at school I see the smooth waves, hear the exciting crash of them breaking perfectly over sandbanks, and feel the Australian sun radiating off my skin, relieved only by the cool water. No, my teacher doesn’t want to hear about my love story with the ocean of a boy and how he controls my life through the constant reminder of his face in the waves.

I could write another’s story. I could write about my Oma. Share my grandmother’s experience as a Holocaust survivor. How in her hometown, Düsseldorf, she refused to wear her star of David, and was lifted onto an SS officer’s shoulder, displayed at 8-years-old as the perfect young Aryan.

How her family escaped Germany to America, her struggles to learn English and fit into a new society, one at war with her homeland. I imagine her as an overwhelmed 13-year-old in an all American high school, studious, shy, determined to become a journalist.

But my memories of Oma are very different.

She sits at her desk, beloved Olivetti typewriter in front of her. Oma’s short silver hair is in its usual neat loose curls, displaying delicate pearl earrings. I sit by the open cedar door of her study, against the wall, just watching her through the fractured sunlight streaming from the window. She collects the paper from the typewriter and precisely folds it, placing it in the bin on top of countless other folded pieces.

At 13, I was able to read some of her work.

Articles on American politics and economics, publications on the UN, but none of it was personal.

Oma didn’t write her story. All I have are fragments, snippets I overheard from late night conversations around the bridge table with old Jewish friends.

Oma never spoke a word of German to me, to anyone, not wanting to relive the scarring memories of her childhood. Only when she was dying of Parkinson’s disease did she mutter German, her brain not being able to decipher the difference between her new tongue and the language she swore never to speak. She would confuse me for her mother, her Mutti, who had not been able to escape Germany. No, I wouldn’t allow her memory to be entangled in her traumatic past, especially now as she rests. I would not tell her story. She couldn’t even write it herself.

I need inspiration. So, I search through my mother’s drawers. Pulling out old passport photos and family jewellery. Trying on pearl necklaces with matching earrings, basking in the musky smell of the past. An hour later I was still sifting through purses, draping dainty scarfs around my neck, and lying on the carpeted floor flipping through photo albums with bangles jangling on my wrists.

Tucked away in an old leather case, softened from years of touch, I find a pile of aerograms, typed on pale blue tissue. Private conservations written by my Oma to my grandfather when they were dating.

Dear Tom, Hi – I miss you.

I’m also in a mood – did you know I get into ‘moods’ occasionally? Sort of black things, lasting sometimes a day or more, when I don’t talk and I cry easily – I think I caught the disease in my teens… I’m sick eh?... I shouldn’t write letters when I’m in a mood…

I know that mood. I hear the black figures trapped in my head, whispering criticism into my ears. Sometimes I don’t talk for more than a couple of days, only my bed hearing my sobs as I will it to swallow me. I caught the disease in my teens too.

I haven’t had a traumatic experience, but I know of the result. I understand how she felt. I realise the moods we have in common. I know that a part of her will always live inside me.

I shouldn’t write imaginative pieces when I’m in a mood…

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ARTWORK: Sian Williams

Ambition on Fleek: How Pinterest took me from GirlFlop to GirlBoss

By Sophie Rosen

At the start of my final year of high school, things were about as far from perfect as they could have been.

COVID-19 was starting to rear its ugly head in places that actually mattered to the media of the Western world. Bushfire smoke meant my summer days at the beach were limited. My grandmother had been dying in hospital for months, and I had just been prescribed antidepressants for my depression and anxiety.

To make matters worse, what I had always struggled with in high school wasn’t the workload itself, or writing essays. Between my undiagnosed attention deficit disorder (ADD) and the subjects my father had ‘encouraged’ me to do, the key factor I was missing was motivation. What good would it do the world if I wrote an essay on the significance of the policy of containment in the Cold War? Who was actually going to care about my thoughts on TS Eliot’s textual integrity and canonical status?

These questions lingered each time I sat down to gather notes for Modern History, or sketch out a Legal Studies essay. Most nights ended with me crying at my desk - mostly because of my general emotional instability, but partly because of schoolwork.

Being a student in these end times is, in a word, utterly Sisyphean. What could the relevance of the structure of the communist Russian government in 1918 possibly have in this warming world, with WW3 on the horizon, where every choice I make as a consumer will eventually trace back to the mistreatment of a four-year-old sweatshop employee?

I repeated this rhetoric to my psychiatrist, to my parents, to my school counsellor, even to my cat Jackson as we laid outside together. Jackson had motivation, drive, a reason to get up and face the day in the morning. He had trees to climb, birds to abuse, other neighbourhood cats to terrorise. I only wished some of his sense of purpose could rub off on me.

I couldn’t escape this mentality throughout the bulk of the year. What good was it to pay attention in my online classes when I could simply mute them with a click of a button? When we returned to school, I was so behind that it seemed impossible to make up lost time, however purposefully it had been lost. Modern History classes were ripe to explore the internet in; I memorised the fifty states of America, played online trivia, watched the West Wing muted with subtitles on, even started and finished a podcast with over seventy hour-long episodes just through the transcripts.

The most valuable past-time, I found, was not any of these, but the website that would be my saviour - Pinterest. Oh, Pinterest.

I had known of the site for years, of course.

It was an oasis of aesthetically pleasing images, Keto recipes, and easy workouts that had served to further my middle-school disordered eating. Due to the latter, I hadn’t frequented it much in recent years, but faced with the unending torture of double Legal Studies, I found myself on it more and more. I made a new account so as to better suit my current hyperfixations. Little did I know, that decision would come to serve me more than I could have ever anticipated.

ARTWORK: Sian Williams

Logging onto my Pinterest feed, freshly wiped with no knowledge of my niche interests in 90s adult animation and Donna Tartt novels, I was faced with the selection the site showed to an average new user. Again — Keto recipes, OOTDs on emaciated Instagram models, and motivational quotes.

I could have never imagined the impact these quotes would have on me. I saved one, and then another, and then another. They saturated my feed, and would echo in my head relentlessly. One day, or Day One? You decide. The disembodied voice of a GirlBoss was right - today was the first day of the rest of my life, a life in which I understood to what extent the USSR rejected capitalist ideology.

If I was to be so bold, perhaps this knowledge I had deemed ‘irrelevant’ could become relevant, if only to be a stepping stone to the future empire I knew I could build. I could manifest success.

Pinterest told me to be savage, not average.

I wouldn’t be average any longer. Today was tomorrow’s yesterday.

Of course, I will disclose that after a particular depressive episode that concluded with a 49 percent markin my Modern History trial and a pesky 4/25 in my Cold War essay, my therapist prescribed me dexamphetamines for my nowdiagnosed ADD. But it wasn’t the small white pills that made me focused, of course - it was Pinterest. It had always been Pinterest. I was, as the website had instructed, addicted to the feeling of having my shit together. I was going to create the life I couldn’t wait to wake up to.

As a writer, I do value honesty. And so, reader, I will be honest with you - the life I ‘couldn’t wait to wake up to’ didn’t involve Modern History. I know that the good guys won in the Cold War, that Nelson Mandela ended racism; what else was there to know? And so, I took the leap I knew I had to as a GirlBoss. I stopped going to most of my Modern classes, because I’m a powerful woman, and I’m not going to let little things like two out of my ten HSC units bring me down.

I visualised my highest self, and I showed up as her.

When my friends filled me in on practice

essays I missed, I’ll admit, these things concerned me. But you don’t grow when you’re comfortable, my desktop wallpaper reminded me, and so I embraced the discomfort. Pinterest allowed me to actualise my true self. It told me to ‘wake up Beauty, it’s time to Beast’, so I lied to my parents. They didn’t need to know about Mr Kwok’s panicked emails to me, not when I was on my own path to greatness.

You may seem doubtful, but this story has a happy ending. I graduated at the top of my English Extension 2 class, and the top of my Studies of Religion 2 class, because I’m a fucking GirlBoss. I put in the work, and I exclusively focused on the things that came naturally to me with little extraneous effort. With the help of dexamphetamines, I cleared the useless knowledge of ‘democratic principles’ and ‘significant figures in Nazi Germany’ out of my head.

Why would I consider the political tensions in the Weimar Republic when there are real political issues happening right now? I’m a passionate socialist, and I don’t have time for Mr. Massey to bring me down talking about whatever happened to the system in Germany in the 1920s. Gustav Stresemann certainly wasn’t a GirlBoss, and he’s irrelevant now.

I just barely snuck into the top 50 percent of my Modern History cohort, which was good enough for me. If anything, my placing third in Extension English and first in Extension 2 is a testament to the power of language.

Now I’ve graduated and harnessed the power of motivation, who knows what hardships I’ll conquer next? I’m seventeen, out and experiencing the real world, and I see no reason to change my ideology. Now I know the value of a simple Pinterest board, there’s nothing I can’t face - whether it be toxic friendships, normalised substance abuse at university, WW3, or the impending destruction of our environment.

My mantra is simply to keep GirlBossing, Gaslighting, Gatekeeping, and Getting refills on ADD medication.

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ARTWORK: Maddy Brown

The Blue Skies of Reconciliation

By Delilah Isherwood Critchley

I remember the distinct feeling of wanting to throw a frying pan at my brother’s face in the middle of an argument, but six months later, as he visits Sydney from Melbourne, all I feel is love and the urge to give him a hug. How could my feelings for him have changed so dramatically? Was our reconciliation just a matter of time?

As my rollercoaster feelings about my brother have taught me, time is a powerful phenomenon. It is the natural path that allows reconciliation between individuals or groups. My personal guru, Justin Bieber, asks for forgiveness and reconciliation in his renowned song Sorry: “Yeah, I know that I let you down, is it too late to say I’m sorry now?” In fact, as I could tell Justin personally, it is never too late to say you are sorry, rather you just have to give the person you’re apologising to enough time to be able to accept your gesture of reconciliation. In contrast, seeking reconciliation hot on the heels of an argument is never a good idea.

That’s when you really could end up with a frying pan in the face. Time allows the sting of hurt to fade. Our memories, especially of pain, don’t linger. I remember the sharp flame of the anger I felt towards my brother, but now it is distant, dim. Just a memory with no power.

Almost every adage about reconciliation expresses the common wisdom that ‘time heals’, just ‘give it time’ and ‘time softens the blow’. But why is time such a powerful healer? How does it help reconciliation? It’s more than just forgetting.

Having time allows one to reflect, and this can lead to acknowledgement to take responsibility for our own part in the hurt that has occurred. This recognition is the first step to reconciliation. When storm clouds are closing over a relationship, time is the light that sheds understanding on a situation.

In Gwen Harwood’s poem, Father and Child, time plays an interesting but key factor. It is clear in I Barn Owl that the father and child share a relationship lacking in trust as the child secretly “crept out with (the) father’s gun”. However, in II Nightfall, as forty years have passed, the child reflects on the relationship, fondly stating: “what memories pack them home”. Has time allowed them to overcome mistrust and reconcile? Has it cleared the skies over their relationship? Or was there another decisive factor, perhaps the father’s approaching death?

If time was a person, death would be its older sibling. The painful experience of death, as the end of time, has the ability to force reconciliation as an imperative, in a way that time does not. Infinite amounts of time allow for an infinite number of future opportunities for reconciliation. Death marks the last and ultimate deadline for this opportunity, creating a strong incentive for forgiveness before it is too late. But why does this urge occur? We are taught at a young age, from the classic Disney movies, that there should always be a happy ending at the close of every story. Cinderella forgives her evil step-sisters, before riding into the sunset with a prince. Perhaps from childhood we subliminally believe this fairy-tale message that being generous, forgiving and reconciling with those who’ve hurt us means we might be rewarded, maybe with a prince?

When facing the end of a life’s story, with death, the concept of a happy ending

through reconciliation finds expression in popular psychology as ‘closure’— the healing or conclusion to a personal loss or trauma. Why leave the story unfinished with loose ends? In terms of reconciliation, one simply needs closure to be satisfied, otherwise the pain of death is allconsuming.

However, maybe it isn’t time or death but our primal need for social interaction that allows reconciliation to occur? Ultimately if we didn’t crave connection, we would have no compulsion to reconcile. Relationships are too complex for tensions not to arise – and so we are constantly having to resolve this. If I wasn’t able to forgive my brother for always dipping his fingers in my tea, my parents would have to celebrate two separate Christmases. Humans need family; we need friends and partners in order to be happy in life. Reconciliation isn’t always motivated by love; it could be the result of our innate fear or anxiety of being alone. We have to be able to reconcile, or else we would live a solitary, and sad, life. The lonely storm cloud in a sky of blue: separate and distant.

Ultimately, regardless of why reconciliation occurs, it is a self-determined process. In Father and Child, the mistrust between the two protagonists are relatively minor, or at least able to be overcome in their eyes. But would that be true if their relationship had suffered a more serious wound? It is up to the individual to decide whether the relationship is worth reconciling; to decide whether the problem is forgivable, or even if they have the will. Do they want to wake up to blue skies instead of grey? I always forgive my brother, knowing that within 24 hours of him being home he will wind me up again. I reconcile with him on the understanding that even if his behaviour is unlikely to change, it is more painful not to be reconciled. The feeling of connection provides an embedded metaphysic map to reconciliation. Perhaps every relationship is a series of betrayals and reconciliations.

Reconciliation helps an individual progress their identity, and better understand themselves and others. Like most things in life, reconciliation is a learning experience and a choice, irrespective of the factors that contribute to it.

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ARTWORK: Beth O’Sullivan

In Praise of Shadows Puma Blue Sam Gollings

It’s worth leaning into Jacob Allen’s (as Puma Blue) brand of trip-hop-inflected ambient pop. I don’t doubt that any critic could write off this music as being too gentle, too washed out, or too subdued, but if you believe it’s there, I think you’ll find that these songs have real character, succeeding in their subtlety.

Generally speaking, the tracks you’ll find on ‘In Praise of Shadows’ opt for quiet atmospherics to shroud muted, murky guitars, beautifully sour notes, hip-hop drum patterns, quietly subterranean bass, and Allen’s unmistakably fragile voice. There’s very little diversion from this downtempo sonic world of his, save for the hurried jazzy breakbeat that establishes the straight OOZ-era Archy Marshall worship of ‘Oil Slick’. The beats here offer, by and large, tasteful minimalism, and give Allen ample space to add really lovely guitar embellishments low down in the mix on many tracks.

I would say that it’s a curious sort of formula he works with here - these tracks are so quiet and downcast (and occasionally vocally indecipherable) that they are quite reliant on strong melodic direction. ‘Sheets’ is a pretty clear-cut example of this - lacking a compelling melody, the song falters into boredom. For the most part though, Allen rises to the occasion musically.

‘Velvet Leaves’ is a pretty strong manifesto for the project as a whole, aided by some of the sharpest writing on the album, conveying some genuinely heartfelt emotion toward his sister.

‘Already Falling’ is fantastic rhythmically - the subtly funky drums, wandering bass, and Allen’s vocals interact so, so nicely. The aforementioned ‘Oil Slick’ is another highpoint; although somewhat

derivative, it’s no less enthralling. ‘Silk Print’ is about as bare as the album gets sonically, with its lone sad guitar floating into the ether, but it’s undeniably devastating, particularly having first heard it immediately following a breakup of my own. ‘Opiate’ pairs a forlorn, almost ominous guitar line with classic trip-hop drums in a pleasing way.

Strangely, ‘Sleeping’ incongruously sounds almost identical to PARTYNEXTDOOR’s ‘Come and See Me’, a brief foray into contemporary R&B. Closing the album, ‘Super Soft’ is well produced, offering a nice touch of acoustic guitar with pads and syncopated, skittering, programmed drums.

I’ll note that ‘Snowflower’, despite possessing a really interestingly obtuse beat, is nearly completely derailed by the warped filters on Allen’s voice. They’re fascinating, sure, but all too distracting and off-pitch.

I do really love the bulk of the instrumentals here, however I feel like I’m wanting for more lyrical intimacy and directness to punctuate the ambience.

‘Is It Because’, for example, is pleasant enough, but lacks focus and ends up just feeling a little overlong.

‘Bath House’, too, is a song I do actually quite enjoy although it suffers in a similar way. These tracks leave so much room for Allen to explore the bleak corners of his psyche, I just feel he’s a bit too vague at times.

That said, I’m pleased with what’s here.

At the right time, in the right melancholic state, I suspect that the music here would speak to any listener willing to engage with its downtempo atmosphere and sly idiosyncrasies.

ARTWORK: Maddy Watson

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ARTWORK: Navita Wijeratne

By Lara Hather

The Social Language of Social Media

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So, as it turns out, the net is no longer metalanguage associated with the knee-high gumboots and waders of fishermen, but rather a universal jargon for the cyber-world. In this new century of ‘LOL’ and ‘OMG’, it’s not difficult to see how, perhaps, this coded underworld has reappropriated the founding pillars of human language. We’ve turned emotions into emojis, exclamations into abbreviations, life milestones into Instagrams... why are the fundamental components of human expression irrevocably discarded? I’m sure our late literature scholars would be appalled to observe the wizard of modern literature herself, J.K Rowling, tweeting about her dog’s ‘festive farting’ as a representation of the pinnacle of writing. But is it possible that these loosened guidelines on what constitutes the English language may, in fact, liberate all avenues of thought?

It’s easy to note how the literal shortening of words may contribute to a loss of complexity in the English language. But that’s just it. It may destroy some facets of English language, but as a ‘death knell’ for one avenue of communication, it could spark the construction of an entire new subculture. Whilst we generally frown upon the overreliance on social media, we fail to recognise how this establishment of new subcultures allows global communication between like-minded individuals.

Barriers with regard to dialects between people in Australia and Japan, for example, can be dissolved, allowing individuals to connect and interact with international values. In a roundabout way, these new programs of translation interconnect us to those with the same ideas and thoughts, regardless of the language they use to express them.

On a more superficial level, the removal of arguably redundant words and letters allows for greater succinctness in the way people choose to argue their thoughts. Symbolic changes attach metaphorical meaning to letters whose definition would be rendered redundant if communicated orally. There is a whole ‘data analysis’ of the shift in meaning from ‘hey’ to ‘heyyyyyyyyy’ - from a simplistic greeting to a joking opening or even a flirtatious proposition. It’s frustratingly simple, but the distinction is there. Yes, it’s founded in traditional literature

standards regarding tone and intonation but, fuelled by the broadening platform of social media, a simple greeting has now been scrutinised based solely on the number of ‘y’s included.

This newfound encouragement toward lexical density, in the most hyperbolic manner imaginable, has allowed strings of history and controversy to be displayed and understood in a fraction of the length of an academic essay. Take the Twitter viral hashtag #MeToo. With just five letters a person can connect their singular experience to a string of stories, incidents and injustices from all over the world, placing their heart with a cause to fight sexual harassment.

Since October 2018, over 19 million tweets have cited the hashtag, including stories such as Christine Ford’s case against Supreme Court judge nominee Brett Kavanaugh, journalist Ashleigh Raper’s against politician Luke Foley, and the 265 elite US female gymnasts’ case against Larry Nassar. These stories have encouraged people to speak up and speak out about issues challenging to detail. Those five letters symbolise solidarity and strength; made possible only by the endless opportunities that the new language of social media creates.

So is social media just a means to brainwash the world into archaic forms of articulation? Are we just pawns in Zuckerberg’s plot to access all our information and rule the world?

Or, possibly, could we have overlooked the capacity of social media to bind us, form language and create new, if not dual, meaning of the word connected.

Academic Progress Alexander An

“Just keep swimming, swimming” - Dory

I’m a stranger amongst these bushed seas. Still after calling this place home for the past four years, I still can only appreciate parts of our city. Studying at the ANU and living in Canberra are intrinsically linked. Perhaps, this is my tale of keeping on. After being here for so long and by writing this article I’m hoping I’m able to self-justify my continued existential existence. As the days pass, I feel an increasingly disjointed sense of self— torn between what I came here to do originally and what I am doing now.

Canberra has perhaps some of the widest lanes on its roads, and equally, a diverse and widening depth of opportunities for those who come here for a new future. This was the hope and motivation that made me move here all those years ago. But as the university year restarts and the summer weather crawls into the retreats of autumn, Canberra returns to a cold atmosphere.

With the plummeting temperatures and blistering winds, my own sense begins to freeze. Whilst the local populace and social hive of the city seem to continue on into the winter, it’s only with the passing of seasons to summer that my life returns to a sense of normality.

Politicians and the parliamentary year return to provide the endless theatre of spectacle we see in the halls of democracy. Public servants begin to crowd our roads and public transport in the peaks of the day. Marking their returns to the offices and frequented cafes after exhausting last year’s worth of accumulated leave. The endless construction sites and projects return to smite our undeveloped capital with endless amounts of light trucks and utes parked everywhere. Our small city centre becomes a hive of social buzz and pleasure on the end of

the week trawls of Thursdays to Saturdays. And of course, both school and university students return to academia’s halls of wisdom in its lecture theatres, libraries, and classrooms.

For me, as the days go by, the capital’s routine begins to eerily plague my weeks and days. It’s only the working week that drives me towards the end. Perhaps a couple of years ago time seemed meaningless to me. Certain days of the week were only distinguished by who was out, and what was open. With growing up and working, time becomes more important to me, especially the weekends and days off where my commitments and obligations are not set in stone. After three years of the same student accommodation, a double degree spread out over four years, and the same chaotic over-demanding retail job, an indescribable toll has scarred my small soul.

The virus and the year we shall not mention initially offered a bleak future. It was terrible working in the frontlines of the life-draining supermarkets and studying by Zoom™. It was terrible for all of us. I was only beginning to appreciate summer, vacations and not adhering to routine. Last year was the year that made us wait for these things to come.

I guess writing this jumbled mess of words makes me feel catharsis and relief for what actually happened to me last year. The taking up of a full-time job and the decision to drop to part time studies were met with little resistance from my parents, friends, and ultimately me. It has eased my mind in terms of the instability caused by full time studies and part time work for such a long period of time. Having now also comfortably nested myself in the ANU-wide hated south, I feel more at ease than I did when I first came to Canberra.

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I still question my decision to come to Canberra. Its people’s lifestyle, culture and life experiences are quite different when compared to experiences of people from the rest of the country. The upbringing of many townies could overwhelmingly be described as sheltered, comfortable, and in some respects, quite privileged.

An overwhelmingly white population, mostly supported by government money on wages and salaries, a lack of diversity and regular engagement with outsiders from other parts of the country.

The complaints by many here are not only first-world in many respects, but out of touch with the realities that many other Australians in other parts of the country face. Arguments of continued skyscrapers, a loss of the bush capital’s trees, a lack of support for the elderly and traffic are common but easily reasoned with when considered with Canberra’s small population. In fact, Canberra’s experience of the COVID-19 lockdowns versus the experiences of the other states, especially Victoria’s prolonged second wave lockdown, revealed entitlement, dispassionate and self-absorbed reactions from not only our leaders, but from its people too.

Perhaps the Canberra bashing part of this article is too much, admittedly written when I was sad and angry as well as after a seven hour wait in Cavalry Public. I return to what I intended to set out to express in this article. For me, the city which I unfortunately call my home was not built for the university student. It is and will be a city built for a different set of people at a different part of their lives. The structural issues with how Canberra is both geographically positioned, planned out and also internally run has perhaps meant interstate, first year university students are not the best placed to move into Canberra’s community. Whilst we can’t change how Canberra is both socially and economically structured, at least not in the short term, we can change the experience of those coming here.

So I implore you, the reader to perhaps adventure out into the local Canberran and wider Australian community and experience the issues facing most. The local stories of the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people’s struggles with recognition and healing as well recognising the conflict in both people’s claims over country. The untold plight of the disadvantaged and have nots, as well as issues

around both community and affordable housing.

And perhaps most importantly, the thousands of communities’ stories of pain gained from last year’s horrific bushfires and worldwide pandemic.

These issues are perhaps worthy of mention. If Dr Andrew Leigh in his maiden speech to Parliament can state that Canberrans are some of the most generous, then surely empathy must be a common characteristic of our community.

Ultimately, I felt that continuing to study for a prolonged period of time was not for me, and it really shouldn’t be for all. There will be a point in time where some may feel that continuing to grind a degree at university is not worthwhile. There are perhaps more all-around benefits by going into the workforce early, not just monetary stability. After a chaotic couple of years working part time, balancing studies and social commitments a normal routine comes as a blessing

A firmer grip on time and the importance of organisation to managing time well. A better ability to empathise due to my work in the local community has meant that I engage with issues that aren’t taught in tutorials or books. And finally, the ability to feel like I am beginning my adulthood the right way. Reality matters more to me rather than hypotheticals, and this is perhaps the underlying reason why I decided work was, in the end, the right choice.

For the readership, this article may be confusing to read at first. Simply put, the city we trap ourselves in isn’t the best to fully support a long academic path like mine. Do other things outside of academia, the more life experiences you gain will be a credit to both you and perhaps the wider Canberran community. If this means stopping or pausing your studies, don’t hesitate or even double think it because it will mean a better outcome for all.

The routinely comedic story of many; came from a major city, got a hospo or retail job, did student society stuff and are either now in an internship or set to graduate, is perhaps something that should disappear. I’m for it, nothing of that life story is interesting. Of course professional success is desired by all but there is so much to miss out by going down that life story. Just like Finding Nemo, life can and should take you to places where you wouldn’t expect to be.

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The Venn Diagram: Mental Health and Neurodivergence Zofia Francis

DISCLAIMER: I am neither a doctor, nor a professional. I’m just a person with a vested interest.

Last week, my boss told the team that while we should disclose to them when we’re sick and need support, “everyone has depression and anxiety”, so we shouldn’t bother them with that one.

So, I’m here to (re)introduce you to two concepts that you may not fully understand: mental health and neurodivergence.

Mental health refers to the ongoing wellness of your mind, similar to how physical health impacts your body. You can look after your mental health through exercise, a work-life balance, variety in life, healthy eating etc. However, you can always develop an illness in response to something external - similar to catching a cold.

Neurodivergence is a different barrel of cats. While not formally recognised, the term neurodivergent is widely preferred to alternatives such as: “mentally d*sabled” or “ret*rded”. It was first used by Judy Singer as a more inclusive way to describe the Autistic community. The brain, or neurology, of someone who is neurodivergent functions as other than the norm. Often, this is something you are born with (the same way you can be born blind), but can also be developed as a result of an external event that causes lasting change to how your brain functions (e.g, a traumatic incident). Some commonly recognised branches of neurodiversity include ASD (Autism Spectrum D*sorder), ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity D*sorder), Dyslexia, Dyspraxia and many more.

Misunderstandings of these two terms, and all that they come with, continue to influence the ways people perceive themselves and others, and can harm those most vulnerable.

I like to think of neurodivergence as a sort of three-dimensional, multi-tiered Venn diagram.

Level 1: Visible Symptoms

The body has only so many ways of expressing symptoms. Anyone who’s been confused about whether they have a cold or COVID can relate. If you search up any different branches of mental health or neurodivergence, you might argue with me: “But Zofia, I can’t find any similarities between ADHD and depression at all?” This is where our internal biases come into play. Symptom lists frequently describe similar or equivalent symptoms using different terms, often because of the preconceptions associated with the conditions they’re describing.

At the end of highschool I was diagnosed with chronic depression and generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). When asked what I was struggling with, I described mind fog, numbness, difficulty sleeping, procrastination. The words I used to describe my struggles came from words I had heard before, unconsciously, in lessons on mental health they taught us in school*. Last year, I was rediagnosed with ADHD and bipolar II. This time, they asked the questions: “Do you feel as though you’re driven by a motor?”, “How long did those feelings last?”, “Are you distracted easily?”, “What are your sleeping patterns?”. These questions changed the lens through which I viewed my own mind. The symptoms hadn’t changed, but they were now described using clinically recognised vocabulary which I had never heard before. Yet externally, despite the different formal descriptions, those symptoms in me had presented the same way.

Level 2: The Internal Sources

Behind this web of overlap, every branch of neurodivergence has its own root causes for the symptoms it displays. For example, I give you three symptoms: “An inability to cope with everyday stress”; “Fidgeting or restlessness” and; “Being easily annoyed or irritated”.

Try guessing which branch of neurodivergence I’m talking about. Good luck!

These symptoms come from lists describing three different diagnoses, and crop up with different phrasing on many more.

Someone with depression might experience fatigue, as everyday tasks become more exhausting and taxing for them. Intrusive thoughts might make them restless and frustrated at their lack of control.

This in turn might cause them to become irritable, or easily upset.

Someone with anxiety might find the unknowns of day-to-day life overwhelming, making it extremely difficult to cope with tasks that might be seen as simple from the outside. They might fidget and become restless as a way to distract themselves, and funnel nervous energy into productivity or over-preparing. Constantly being on edge makes it harder to control emotions and can make one easily annoyed, irritated, or exhausted.

Someone with ADHD might have trouble keeping track of time and find the uncontrollable nature of day-to-day life exhausting and difficult to cope with. They might have too much energy and struggle to sit still, becoming restless or fidgety.

They might feel flooded with thoughts and have trouble regulating their emotions and, as a result, sometimes react disproportionately to certain situations.

These symptoms may appear anywhere, but to seek help, identifying the source of the symptom is crucial. No amount of CBT** is going to give my ADHD brain a semblance of understanding linear time (google: time blindness). Antidepressants would not only be useless for my bipolar II, they might actually make my cycles more volatile. On the other hand, mood-stabilisers have been the miracle I was waiting for. Knowing these sources changes how we understand our symptoms and gives us the tools to both recognise our strengths and seek support for our weaknesses.

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Level 3: Diversity

The final, most fun tier! Within everything, there is diversity. Not every person with ADHD is alike, nor do they experience ADHD in the same way. Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) literally has spectrum in the name. It would be misguided, however, to view this spectrum or diversity as a simple sliding scale.

It is not a linear progression from “bad/ nonfunctional” to “not-bad/normal”, and looking at it that way is frankly offensive. It’s a beautiful sphere of experience, with variation in expression, experience and intensity. No one in these groups has it inherently better or worse than another. That concept comes from onlookers, who determine our worth or our legitimacy by how much they perceive us to be different.

The diversity within these groups is within them, meaning contrary to the beliefs of many boomers, we are not “all on the spectrum”. Or at least, we aren’t all on every spectrum.

“But wait Zofia! My doctor said I had anxiety because of my exam?? Does that mean I’m neurodivergent?? I’m better now, does that mean I know how to fix it??” Good question! Of course, I am not a doctor, and I don’t know you. But here we circle back to the beginning: mental health vs neurodivergence. Remember that first tier of our diagram? The symptoms? Over the course of your life, you will at one point or another experience some or many or all of the visible symptoms on that tier. Your experience with those symptoms might be passing, or it could be a major event in your life. Whatever it is, however mild or severe, your experience is valid, important, and real - and you deserve and need support.***

But there is a difference between experiencing a symptom, experiencing mental illness, and having a fundamental difference in the way your body works. Many people experience feelings of anxiety associated with a high stress situation. This can sometimes be debilitating. But remove them from the situation and, with support, help and treatment, they may no longer experience that anxiety. Someone with GAD or an anxiety d*sorder experiences anxiety without necessarily having those external stimuli. While they can do

things to manage those symptoms, at the end of the day, that is the way their brain works.

Managing your mental health is as important as your physical health, but is not always comparable to a branch of neurodivergence.

Despite the similarities in symptoms, the way you manage, or treat mental health don’t always work as a usable mechanism for someone neurodivergent.

For us, this is not an illness, nor is it something inherently bad. This is just us, who we are. Not defining, but part of. We have our strengths and our weaknesses, just like you, but ours might be in more unlikely places. There is no one-time-fix that will cure us. Why would being neurotypical be seen as a cure anyway?

This is not to say that mental health is trivial.

It is vital, and as someone with both Bipolar II and ADHD I, know the importance of maintaining that health. Without it, the intensity of my episodes increase, I struggle more with regulating my emotions, my time blindness is amplified and I lose track of my physical self-care. Mental illnesses can be, at best, exhausting, and at worst, deadly. This is why it is so important that we understand where our overlaps lie, so we can all get the help we need, and celebrate the diverse strengths that our diverse minds bring to the table. With some luck and communication, we can muddle through the mystery of our heads together.

*I am so, so glad we talked about mental health in school. This is in no way a criticism of that. **Cognitive Behavioural Therapy: very helpful for intrusive thoughts often seen in depression and anxiety ***Your experiences with mental illness are important and should not be dismissed. Please seek help if you feel yourself experiencing trouble with your mental health, or if anything in this piece has spoken to, or provoked something for you.

Lifeline Australia: 11 13 14 Kids Helpline: 1800 55 1800 Junction Youth Health Services: 6232 2423 ANU Wellbeing and Support Line: 1300 050 327 Access Mental Health: 1800 629 354 ANU Counselling Centre: 02 6178 0455

ARTWORK: Maddy Brown

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ARTWORK: Maddy Brown

Is time travel in 4-D space logically possible?

Martha Reece

The idea of time travel has been explored in science fiction countless times over the last century.

Authors have fantasised about visiting the future and changing the past. The development of general relativity revealed the real scientific possibility of time travel in our universe. However, considering the universe in a realistic manner places some constraints on actual time travel, and there are many paradoxes which suggest logical inconsistencies in the concept of time travel.

We can consider some of these constraints on time travel in four-dimensional space by expanding upon the time travel presented in some works of pop-culture such as Terminator and Harry Potter.

We must firstly build a strong concept of what time travel in four-dimensional space would look like. Below is an illustration of the ‘block universe’ theory, which depicts a ‘block’ that contains every event in space-time that has and will ever occur. (Note, the real ‘block’ is four dimensional.)

A main requirement is that the past and future we are traveling to must actually exist. Time is a space-like dimension. So while we may intuitively believe that time is somehow fundamentally distinct from space, we should instead treat time as the fourth dimension of space.

ARTWORK: Maddy Brown

The features we observe that distinguish time from space can be accounted for by assuming that we are embedded into this 4-D universe in such a way that we interact differently with one of the dimensions. A useful analogy is that of free motion through 3-D space.

her from doing so, since she has been born, of her grandfather’s child.

When moving through space under a constant velocity, we can’t independently come to rest, or change directions in space. Similarly, in the fourth dimension, ‘time’, we can imagine the motion we usually experience through time as ‘falling’ through the fourth dimension at a constant velocity, with nothing to“grab” on to alter, stop or reverse our motion through time.

In Doctor Who, the Doctor and their companions are depicted going back in time and making alterations which change the (future) scenario which they left. In modern Doctor Who, it is revealed that “some things are fixed”, while “some things are in flux”, and that only ‘timelords’ (the Doctor) are able to tell such events apart.

This suggests that in traveling through time backwards, we would be no more able to ‘’jump in time’ than we are able to ‘jump in space’! A great example of this is the ‘time turner’ in the third Harry Potter film, when time rewinds from the perspective of Harry and Hermoine for them to reach the past.

The time traveller must also stay within the 4-D universe. When entering the past or future, they cannot actually move to some alternate universe, or another “branch of spacetime”. Both Harry Potter and Terminator adhere to this condition, as interactions between time travelers and others in the past are consistent with past events in the same universe.

The dominant threat to the idea of time travel is a class of theoretical situations called paradoxes, and specifically those involving ‘closed time-like curves’ (CTCs).

CTCs, which are often referred to as ‘time loops’, are paths through spacetime in which an object returns to its initial position in both space and time. The idea of time travel, including scientific explorations of the concept, allows the existence of CTCs. This creates a range of paradoxes.

An example of this is the grandfather paradox. This paradox describes a traveler whose grandfather died in a certain year after their birth, who travels to the past to kill her grandfather before her parents (grandfather’s child) have been conceived. While the time traveler has every intention of killing her grandfather, if time travel is consistent, there must be something preventing

One response is the idea of some set of rules determining what can and cannot be changed in the past.

Yet in reality, there is an effect called the ‘Butterfly effect’, describing how even a tiny change in the starting conditions of a chaotic system will have a huge impact after enough time passes.

So any past scenario that a time-traveller might enter could be described as a chaotic system and, as such, any change that the time traveller makes will have drastic consequences in the future from which they came. This suggests that there cannot be, as Doctor Who would suggest, some changes that can be made without significant consequences, while other changes cannot be made.

The repercussion of the butterfly effect for time travel is that there can be no ‘original version’ of the past that a time traveler changes, but instead, whatever actions a traveler performs in the past must truly have occurred in that time period.

Harry Potter also employs a list of time travelling rules which must be followed in order to avoid dangerous changes to the future. However, these do not imply any sense of an “original version” of the past. The time travelers were always there - e.g, Harry and Hermonie at Hagrid’s hut. In this respect, Harry Potter actually provides a better explanation! You cannot change the past at all, and the reason that the past never consists of time travelers killing their own grandfathers is because there are rules against this.

Nonetheless, this might still be an unsatisfactory response, as rules can always be broken! In the film, Terminator is sent to the past to kill Sarah

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Connor, the mother of John Connor, who is alive in the future. In the future, John becomes aware of this and sends his friend, Kyle, back to the same point in the past to stop the Terminator from killing his mother before she can give birth to him.

Kyle succeeds, and on the mission falls in love with Sarah Connor and becomes John’s father. As John is alive in the future, it must always have been the case that Kyle was his father, suggesting that the events in the past always had to occur in the way they did, otherwise John wouldn’t have been alive in the future to cause Kyle and the Terminator to travel back. The narrative of Terminator seems to suggest that, if such a paradox is set up, some other events will prevent the paradoxical situation from playing out.

In order to save the possibility of time travel, and more rigorously explain a universe where such a CTC paradox could never occur, we may consider two theories: determinism, and Novikov’s selfconsistency principle.

Kyle could not have had free will once he travelled to the past, as in the future he came from, John was alive, having been born the son of Sarah and Kyle. This implies that, while in the past, a time traveler moves within a completely determined world.

Similarly, if a time traveller were to enter the future and then return to the present, events in the future which lead her to return in the precise manner which she does are completely determined. Thus, anyone else travelling to the future, or anyone who lives their life at “normal speed” in that time has no free will within that time period. If time travel takes place, the universe is determined from the Big Bang until that latest point to which a time traveler travels.

Assuming that any time is available to a time traveler, and she can travel as far into the future as it exists, we must accept one of two things: either that the act of travelling to a point in time fundamentally alters the universe to be determined until that point, or that a universe in which time travel can occur is already deterministic. However, as change is something dependent on time, the first option is unviable as the alteration occurs ‘outside’ of time. So, a four-dimensional universe where time travel is possible must be deterministic!

Now, we also need some sort of explanation to ensure that CTC paradoxes can’t physically occur. One way is through considering Novikov’s self-consistency principle, which states that the probability of any event which could cause a paradox, or a change to the past, is zero. In other words, there cannot exist multiple ‘branches’ of a four-dimensional universe - there is only one ‘timeline’.

In practice, there are many ways a paradoxspawning event could never exist. For instance, we may just never know what could cause a paradox!

Or, it might be the case that no one ever tries to, or that if they do, something goes wrong, preventing them to do so. But in any case, the paradoxical situation will never be set up properly. The selfconsistency principle would explain why the Terminator could never have killed Sarah Connor, and has the same effect as the time travel rules mentioned in Harry Potter without the possibility of rule-breaking.

Of course, it’s also possible that we don’t live in a four-dimensional space, and that branching of space-time could accommodate changing of the past, present and future by time travelers with free will in an undetermined universe. However, in a fourdimensional space where there is no determinism, or the self-consistency principle does not hold, CTC paradoxes present a logical contradiction to the possibility of time travel. In a four-dimensional space which is determined and self-consistent, time travel is logically possible, but time travelers are unable to alter the past or future, and must journey through space and time to reach their destination.

Unfortunately, this suggests that the events in many fictional depictions of time travel could never occur in a four-dimensional space, though the time travel related events of The Terminator or Harry Potter remain logically possible!

Personal Reflections on the Uyghur Situation

By Anonymous

As a politics student, I’m fully aware that one day I would encounter this issue, but I never thought it would be so soon.

nationality. I don’t know what is true and what is not, so I am here to share some of my beliefs. Whether you agree is up to you.

Growing up in Urumqi and holding Uyghur heritage as well as Chinese heritage, I feel I’m quite knowledgeable when it comes to this topic: Uyghurs. Many of the more politically inclined readers may already be familiar with this topic, but a brief and proper introduction is important nonetheless.

I have to stress that there is a huge difference in the ideologies between the West and the East. Western ideology often identifies conflicts between a nation and a state that is striving for independence. Chinese ideology, on the other hand, chooses to ignore their differences no matter how trivial or significant, and aims to achieve a peaceful position in between. For example, Scotland and Catalonia have been fighting for their respective independence for decades. However, in China you rarely see ethnic groups seeking independence. To put it more simply, people in the East tend to surrender to their governments or authorities. They seek peace and quiet instead of freedom and so-called democracy. That’s probably the reason why countries in Asia are more successful during this pandemic. Even though some people (i.e. me) have their doubts about government policy, when it’s a matter of life and death, they end up reluctantly following government directives.

Nonetheless, there were some Uyghur and Tibetan people who tried to gain independence from China, but undoubtedly failed and ended up escaping to the USA.

The conflicts between the Uyghur community and the vast majority of the combined Chinese community is actually a controversy between states (nation-states) and nations (ethnic minorities). China contains nations like the majority Han, Mongolian, Tibetan, Kazakhs, Uyghur etc. In other words, the inconsistency between the nation and the state it belongs to, is possibly the main cause of the issues.

I have never been a patriotic person, quite unfortunately. I don’t like China one bit. I am never proud of my nationality and instead, I often see it as a motive that constantly drives me to work hard and leave as soon as possible (thanks to ScoMO’s harsh migration policies, that may be some time away).

I hate almost every policy implemented by my government, except for the COVID-19 policies -- it saved my life and got me vaccinated in the very first round. Growing up in a multicultural environment and attending an international high school, I have been very much exposed to different cultures, not just the Western world. Frankly, everything I believe in is the exact opposite of the so-called standard moral beliefs in China nowadays. I always feel like an outsider in my own country, a girl without a

The 90’s are referred to as ‘the Golden Times’. Almost everywhere in the world people were experiencing an all-time high in prosperity in every aspect of life. Uyghur people at that time were also experiencing freedom, especially in the form of artistic expression. People of different nationalities (ethnic groups) in China created magnificent art during the 90s, because they were free back then.

Nowadays everything is under a strict censorship.

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In the 21st-century, the Uyghur community continued to grow. Before President Xi took office in 2013, we were living like a little kingdom inside a super country. People inside this little kingdom had achieved autonomy to the level of independence.

When Xi was in charge, he came to realise that this little kingdom must come to an end or it would no longer be HIS little kingdom. Consequently, he did something that all of us considered cruel. He knew that when you want to erase a nation you must forbid its people to speak their own language. So he gradually closed all bilingual schools and forced ethnic children to learn only Mandarin Chinese.

This lasted for some years. When I was young I saw some bilingual schools but from 2019 onwards, they ceased to exist.

Meanwhile, President Xi forced all television and radio shows to be broadcasted only in Mandarin Chinese. He sent a group of our great leaders, thinkers, authors to be ‘re-educated’, some of whom were never seen again. I have seen my people in great pain during the first few years of Xi’s movement. I have once been to the prison where those great minds were re-educated -- it is too painful to describe what I’ve seen. Many Uyghur people escaped overseas to countries like Australia and Canada, but their relatives left in China remain under strict censorship. Passports have been taken away by the government, and hotels in other cities of China won’t accept Uyghur guests. Local shops were closed, everything written in Mandarin -- ethnic languages were forbidden to be spoken even occasionally.

But in late 2018, Xi stopped and gave freedom back to those tragic people. Uyghur languages were seen again in the street. Radios and televisions could speak Uyghur or other ethnic languages as well. Passports were given back, some re-educated people released from prison and people were able to contact their relatives overseas.

Everything seemed to back the way it used to be.

But it wasn’t. It may have seemed okay, but the impacts of Xi’s political strategy were devastating, especially towards my generation. An increasing number of youth are claiming Mandarin as their mother tongue. Only approximately 25 percent of them can write in Uyghur. Cultural prosperity will never be seen again, we don’t have famous poets or philosophers or even artists. Our most famous works are now in Mandarin.

Even though Uyghur people have regained their freedom, their culture has been harshly damaged. As for the damage to the Islamic culture itself, sadly the last two generations in my family identify with their heritage before their religion.

We don’t combine them together, and tend to explain our habits associated with Islamic culture as more of a ‘tradition’. For example, I don’t eat pork simply because ‘I just don’t’. Many people won’t follow a strict rule of ‘halal’, they’ll eat anything as long as there is no pork. They even get red packets resembling those from the Lunar New Year at Eid al-Adha.

There are also rumours about genocide and inhumane actions administered by the Chinese government. I personally don’t believe in that. It is brutal, but I have decided to keep an open mind about this until I find evidence of my own.

Last but not least, despite so many unfortunate things that have happened in the past, my generation are more and more accepted by the general Chinese public. Uyghur students are given a 50 points bonus in the most fiercely competitive Chinese gaokao (National College Entrance Exam) which enables us to more easily access the top universities in China. People now recognise us as a beautiful and mysterious ethnic group and you can see outstanding Uyghur people in every field within China. It’s true that we are under a lot of censorship here, but who isn’t? It’s China. I can’t even log onto Facebook without the help of a VPN.

We are living in a peaceful and free environment now, and all those fears are gone. This new generation is doing everything possible to spread our unique culture. It isn’t lost, and it never will be! I do not want my generation to be filled with hatred towards our country, all we ever wanted was peace and love. Like I said, I don’t like China one bit but I LOVE the cities and associated cultures I am living in, or have lived in – specifically Nanjing and Urumqi.

I hope this is the last time I talk about this issue. We should always have our own judgement and choose our own path.

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We would like to acknowledge the Ngunnawal and Ngambri people, who are the traditional custodians of the land on which Woroni is created. We pay respects to Elders past, present and emerging. We acknowledge that the name Woroni was taken from the Wadi Wadi Nation without permission, and we are striving to do better for future reconciliation.