I have an ardent confession to make: I love love.
Not the kind where you keep your options in a shopping cart, swiping left and right like you’re browsing for a winter coat. Not the kind where you meet someone twice, tell them they feel like home, and then disappear from the face of the planet. Not the kind where you bask in the warmth of a “what are we?” conversation when you’ve already met their mum. And certainly not the kind where affection arrives in the form of “you up?” at 3 a.m.
I love love: the kind where you buy them flowers just because; where you remember the little things, some told, some observed. The kind where you keep a secret list of their likes and dislikes in your Notes app; where you write silly little love missives, i’s dotted with hearts, and slip them into their bag. The kind where you soak paper in coffee, spray it with your perfume and post letters that smell like you. The gut-wrenchingly vulnerable kind of love.
And oh, love letters! I love love in love letters. Because what do you mean you sat down, picked up a pen, and poured your feelings onto paper, knowing those words would endure? Love letters once carried the weight of human emotion, but maybe we don’t want to confront that weight anymore. Maybe knowing you can always just ghost someone feels safer. Maybe we fear the vulnerability, and lack the sheer courage it takes to send something we can’t edit, can’t unsend, can’t delete. After all, it takes time for ink on paper to fade.
My fervent interest in the disappearance of love letters led me to Kafka’s Letters to Milena, a poignant glimpse into what love once looked like on paper.
If you don’t know Franz Kafka (which, honestly, loser behaviour), here’s a crash course: brilliant, existentially tortured, and pathetically in love. A man obsessed with writing letters. His letters to Milena Jesenská, his long-time lover, are some of the most intimate insights into his mind.
Now that I’ve read the book, and based on the multiple love letters my friends have penned for me over time, here’s how to (and how not to) write a love letter.
Lost for words, not lost for love
Your love letter doesn’t need to begin with a grand, sweeping declaration of eternal devotion. You don’t need to overthink it. Just start writing.
A lot of Kafka’s letters to Milena are simply him describing his day, his surroundings, and the way the world feels without her in it:
“I’m living quite well here, the mortal body could hardly stand more care. The balcony outside my room is sunk into a garden, overgrown and covered with blooming bushes… Lizards and birds, unlikely couples, come visit me: I would very much like to share Meran with you.”
He describes the world around him and says, I wish you were here. That’s it. That’s love.
Love isn’t just grand gestures; it’s the desire to share even the most mundane moments with someone. It’s missing them, not just when you’re alone but in a room full of distractions too. Write, no matter how trivial your thoughts seem. Ultimately, it’s the sentiment that counts.
Say what you mean, mean what you feel
In one letter, Milena tells Kafka she loves him, but she also loves her husband, Pollak, and will never leave him.
Emotionally devastating? Yes. Diabolical? Yes.
But at least they’re honest with each other. They both know where they stand.
A love letter must be steeped in truth, a sincere reflection of your heart. Be clear in your intentions, and for the love of all that matters, don’t twist something as sacred as a love letter into a tool for manipulation or love-bombing. It should resonate with authenticity, so that even decades later, when discovered in a forgotten shoebox, its essence remains as vibrant and true as the day it was penned.
You can be vulnerable without being a walking red flag (unlike Kafka)
“Perhaps it isn’t love when I say you are what I love the most—you are the knife I turn inside myself, this is love.”
Look, I love vulnerability. I love raw, messy, unfiltered emotion as much as the next person. But there’s a fine line between being deeply romantic and concerningly unhinged. Kafka, unfortunately, did not know where that line was.
You, however, should.
Pour your heart out, yes. Tell them how much they mean to you. But maybe don’t write things that make them question whether they need to file a restraining order. Aim for endearment, not distress. Love letters should leave the reader feeling adored, not burdened.
Beware: love is both glory and doom
“I wrote you a note from Prague and then from Meran. I have not received any answer. It so happens the notes did not require a particularly prompt reply and if your silence is nothing more than a sign of relative well-being, then I am completely satisfied.”
Kafka writes every day. He writes without expecting a response. Because perhaps the greatest joy of love was always being able to express it.
Now, I’m not telling you to flood your crush’s inbox with a thousand love letters even after they’ve clearly rejected you. I am not enabling that behaviour.
All I am saying is, don’t be afraid to let people know what they mean to you. Just don’t expect too much in return. As much as it sucks, sometimes HE’S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU. But then there is always that lucky possibility that they adore you just as much as you do. You’ll never know until you deliver that letter.
Kafka is overwhelming and raw in his honesty. Would a modern-day Milena be charmed by Kafka’s letters, or would she block him for sending messages at dawn that sound like existential crises? Who knows.
Letters to Milena reminds us that love–real, heart-wrenching love, is worth writing down.
Sure: we’re all hustling through life, our emotions are condensed into emoji quick-reactions and hastily-composed replies to Instagram stories, and vulnerability feels more like a risk than a rite. Who has time for grandiloquent prose when doom scrolling is afoot and another “seen” notification waits to be artfully ignored? Love letters are a high-stakes gamble with scant returns.
But here’s a little secret: I still have every note and letter I’ve ever received, lovingly placed on my bedside table. Some are from people who have since become strangers to me, while others are from those I speak to every day. Regardless, I cherish the habit of revisiting them every few weeks.
People often lose sight of how loved they are, no matter how many cutesy reels you send their way. Love letters, however, ensure that this truth remains vivid and undeniable.
So, write one. Let the people you love know you love them. It will always be worth every effort.
Woroni Radio welcomes you to the first Woroni Gig Guide for 2025! This guide lists most, if not all, shows happening in Canberra between now and the start of April. Originally, this was devised as a feature for the upcoming Extinction magazine, to showcase the fact that local live music is very much, in fact, not extinct. However, timelines made this impossible, so we have published it on our site so that whoever needs it can use it to its fullest extent. This list isn’t comprehensive, so if you know of any upcoming shows, feel free to let us know via emailing radio@woroni.com.
Bands, times, and prices are accurate at time of writing * = concession prices
Every Saturday
Wayne Kelly Trio @ Tilley’s Devine Cafe Gallery (6:00pm, FREE)
Friday 14/3
Crucial Waft (calyx, Sia Ahmed + Tom Fell & NIMBY) @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $15)
Tijuana Cartel @ The Baso (7:00pm, $51)
A Commoner’s Revolt, Domesticated Incels & Ben Pegram @ The Polo (7:00pm, $15)
Saturday 15/3
Pseudo Echo @ The Baso (7:00pm, $51)
Lost Coast & Flik & Frames @ The Polo (7:30pm, $20)
The Filthy Darlings, The Shadow Ministers & The Petch Experience @ Smith’s Alternative (9:00pm, $15)
Sunday 16/3
Georgia Bennett @ The Old Canberra Inn (4:00pm, FREE)
Inez Hargaden (4:00pm, FREE)
Sam Buckingham @ Smith’s Alternative (7:00, $25*)
Tuesday 18/3
Ruthie Foster @ The Street Theatre (7:30pm, $75)
Thursday 20/3
Kim Salmon’s Smoked Salmon @ Smith’s Alternative (9:30pm, $35*)
The Brother Brothers & Isobel Rumble @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $20*)
Friday 21/3
Khan & Voodoo Acid Space Kings @ The Baso (7:00pm, $30)
Majelen & Tessa Devine @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $15*)
RAMSTONE, The Filthy Darlings & Napoleon Ice Cream @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $20)
Shivi Vachaspati Trio @ Dickson Taphouse (8:00pm, FREE)
Ziggy Alberts @ UC Refectory (7:30pm, $93)
Saturday 22/3
Blue Angel & Dr Wiedemann’s Orchestra & Black Owl Quartet @ Smith’s Alternative (3:00pm, $10*)
David McCredie @ Smith’s Alternative (6:00pm, $20*)
Eviscerate The Crown, Russian Novel, Telurian & Switch Up @ The Baso (7:00pm, $18)
FUNLAND (Tired Lion, Verge Collection, Egoism, Smartcasual, Sonic Reducer, Sunsick Daisy, Swapmeet & Archie) @ UC Hub Courtyard (4:00pm, $52)
STS Fest (Flavuh, The Engine, Nuta Mantis & Buffy) @ Dissent Bar & Cafe (7:30pm, $20)
The Sunday Estate @ The Baso (7:00pm, $23)
Zambezi Sounds @ Smith’s Alternative (9:00pm, $15)
Sunday 23/3
Chris O’Connor @ The Old Canberra Inn (4:00pm, FREE)
Comfy Gutters & Liz Caddy @ Smith’s Alternative (3:00pm, $10*)
Moondog @ Dickson Taphouse (4:00pm, FREE)
Wednesday 26/3
Kristina Olsen & Peter Grayling @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $25*)
Thursday 27/3
Travis Collins @ The Baso (7:00pm, $33*)
Friday 28/3
Black Owl Quartet @ Dickson Taphouse (8:00pm, FREE)
Cardboard Cutouts & Sex With Men @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $15)
Kasey Chambers @ Canberra Theatre Centre (7:30pm, $91)
Lakeside at 5 (Rachel Thoms Trio & Aidan and Bianca) @ Tuggeranong Arts Centre (5:30pm, donation)
The Crossbenchers @ The Old Canberra Inn (7:00pm, FREE)
The Weeping Willows & Great Aunt @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $20*)
Saturday 29/3
Big Reef, Rat Boy School Excursion & Buzzcuts @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $10)
Capital Punishment (Shackles, Fat Lip, Gravitate, Highland Light, Discount Code, Step 2 Me & Minefield) @ The Baso (7:00pm, $45)
John Craigie & Kassi Valazza @ Smith’s Alternative (6:00pm, $45)
Johnny Reynolds Band @ The Old Canberra Inn (2:00pm, FREE)
La Descarga & Los Chavos @ The Polo (7:30pm, $35) Sunday 30/3 Flik @ The Old Canberra Inn (4:00pm, FREE)
Georgia Bennett @ Dickson Taphouse (4:00pm, FREE)
Tuesday 1/4
Stand Atlantic & RedHook @ The Baso (7:00pm,. $56)
Thursday 3/4
Kim Churchill @ Smith’s Alternative (9:30pm, $40)
Pierce Brothers & Flynn Gurry @ UC Hub (7:00pm, $46)
You Am I & Grace Cummings @ UC Refectory (7:00pm, $91)
Friday 4/4
Bootleg Rascal, Dante Knows & Dizzy Days @ The Baso (7:00pm, $45)
Flynn Marcus Quartet @ Dickson Taphouse (8:00pm, FREE)
We Mavericks & Two If By Sea @ Smith’s Alternative (6:30pm, $20*)
Saturday 5/4
Ess-Em, Doxxed & A Commoner’s Revolt @ Dissent Cafe & Bar (7:30pm, $20)
Lucie Thorne + Hamish Stuart @ Smith’s Alternative (4:00pm, $20*)
Sunday 6/4
Dean Haitani @ Dickson Taphouse (4:00pm, FREE)
Lewis DeLorenzo @ The Old Canberra Inn (4:00pm, FREE)
Comments Off on So, You Want to Read Judith Butler? Start with these 5 Essays.
Love them or hate them, Judith Butler might just be one of the most influential thinkers of the last 30 years, spawning and developing our understanding of basically all humanities concerns: sexuality and gender, language and meaning, peace and violence, relationships and family, identity and subjectivity, law and politics, and even life and death.
I would argue that anyone studying law, arts, philosophy, languages, politics, and even biology or medicine would benefit greatly from at least one of Butler’s insights — and I’d assume that’s very likely to include you.
Butler is best-known for their theory of performativity, applying linguist J. L. Austin’s theory of ‘performative’ utterances – acts of speech which, in being spoken, bring that action into being (e.g. “I promise…” → constitutes a promise) – to a general understanding of our performative constitution of gender/sexual identity – acts of social speech, if you will. Or, in Butler’s words:
Consider gender, for instance, as a corporeal style, an “act,” as it were, which is both intentional and performative, where “performative” suggests a dramatic and contingent construction of meaning. (Gender Trouble, p177)
Confused? Don’t worry.
Whether you’ve ever referred to gender as ‘performed’, or simply acted in a way that was intended to represent – to ‘do’ – your gender (like actively choosing the cologne that’s assigned to your gender)… you’re evidence of Butler’s argument.
Butler’s ideas remain equally consequential and controversial in the wide-ranging canon of continental philosophy; whilst the philosopher has books and prizes written in their honour, they have also been dubbed ‘the Professor of Parody’ with protests against their work in Brazil which burnt an effigy of her.
That said, Darin Barney provides the following defence of Butler, summarising their legacy amid polarised reception amongst certain sections of their academe:
[Their] work… on gender, sex, sexuality, queerness, feminism, bodies, political speech and ethics has… also changed the lives of countless people whose bodies, genders, sexualities and desires have made them subject to violence, exclusion and oppression, by lending recognition, dignity and power to their experience, and by illuminating the contours of an ethics in which we might begin to live well with, and because of, the differences that constitute us.
Where do I stand?
After reading the preface to Gender Trouble in Year 10 at the ripe age of 15, my life was never the same; truly, an anagnorisis of my gay (?) teenagehood.
Butler’s work proved instrumental to my relationship with myself, my body, and the plethora of bodies and selves (and embodied selfhoods!) I have come across in my lifetime. I probably revisit Butler on a fortnightly-to-monthly basis in some capacity, either reading their work directly or another scholar’s Butlerian analysis.
However, even a Butlerite like me can admit that their work can be difficult to read, especially for a beginner. 26 years ago, Butler won first prize in the journal Philosophy and Literature’s ‘Bad Writing Competition’ for a 94-word sentence.
…Regardless of the polarity of their work’s reception, Butler’s importance as a theorist, a writer, and an academic is clear.
So, having chipped away at Butler’s body of work for four, coming on five, years… I have collated an ordered list of five essays (~70 pages total) to get started with Butler’s work, each with a difficulty rating, the length, the overall topics, and my favourite quote.
Essay 1) Judith Butler: ‘We need to rethink the category of woman’
For: anyone!!
Difficulty: 1 / 5 stars (2000 words)
Topics: Queer and feminist politics/activism; performativity; queer history
Gender is an assignment that does not just happen once: it is ongoing. We are assigned a sex at birth and then a slew of expectations follow which continue to “assign” gender to us.
Let’s start with an interview with theorist Julie Gleeson. Here, Butler’s reflections span a range of topics, tracking temporal and cultural differences in the many political arenas in which they operate: queer rights, access to academia, collective action, what it means to have or do a gender. While not essential reading, Gleeson’s interview showcases Butler’s interconnected, interdisciplinary approach, deepening your reading of her work.
Essay 2) Protest, Violent, and Nonviolent
For: politics, international relations, history, and law students
Difficulty: 1 / 5 stars (12 pages)
Topics: (Anti-)Fascism; political action; democracy; class; justification of violence; harm
Protest is a way of voting on and with the streets, asserting a sense of the people that remains radically unrepresented by the “representative” government that exists. (p 239)
Two great things about this essay are that it’s written really simply, and there are no overdrawn academic footnotes as Butler introduces, analyses, and moves on from each external reference. This is great for those without a thorough backing in theory or philosophy, hence why I’ve suggested it so early in my list of accessible Butler works. Read these 12 pages and you’ll never think the same way about the scenes of violence our society lets slide (but maybe shouldn’t): tasers, arrests, insecticide, your parents smacking you.
Essay 3) How Can I Deny That These Hands and This Body Are Mine?
For: philosophy, linguistics, and English students
Difficulty: 2 / 5 stars (18 pages)
Topics: Descartes; the mind vs the body; thinking; writing; embodiment; metaphysics
There is no writing without the body, but no body fully appears along with the writing that it produces. (p 28)
Did you take PHIL1004 and also find yourself deeply dissatisfied with Descartes’ work? Read this. I found this when preparing for my PHIL1004 final exam, desperate for an articulation of the holes I kept poking in Cartesian mind-body dualism (the idea that our minds and our bodies are separate entities; the former, reliable and the latter, an obstacle to our access to the former). Butler tears Descartes to shreds, without the overly verbose technicality that analytic philosophy seeks to ingrain in a budding philosopher. Like psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, Butler exposes the impossibility of Descartes’ attempt to disembody himself through his philosophical practice.
Essay 4) Kinship beyond the Bloodline
For: sociology, biology, medicine, policy, law, international relations, or history students
Difficulty: 3 / 5 stars (22 pages)
Topics: Family; queerness; slavery; blood; culture; race; friends-as-family; relationships; coming out; family law
On the one hand, the reduction of kinship to genetic tie… is one way that the government evacuates the affective character of the bond of kinship. On the other hand, that same affective tie is presumed and exploited by the exact same policy. (p 33)
Is blood thicker than water? Butler manages to pack a LOT into this essay, blending STEM and the Arts remarkably, hence my 3/5 difficulty rating; even though everyone should read this essay, some aspect of this analysis will almost certainly be outside of your usual. Butler covers epigenetics, migration policy, tribalism, reproduction, and the family to present an account for how society and science blend natural and cultural processes in its heteronormative structuring of relationships.
Essay 5) Performative Acts and Gender Constitution
For: anyone gay; English, sociology, philosophy — or any Arts students
Difficulty: 4 / 5 stars (12 pages)
Topics: Phenomenology; bodies; theatre; gender; identity; performance; speech acts; gay shit
Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed. (p 527)
I’m leaving the most challenging, but most rewarding for last: where it all started (at least, the gender theory). It’s here that Butler first introduces their theory of gender performativity. This piece is technical, but not particularly challenging – I read it in Year 10 without any background in philosophy; for me, my curiosity about much-asked questions (Why are you gay? What makes you gay? Are you a guy or a girl?) were plenty to pique my interest.
If you want to really, really understand every question you’ve probably asked yourself from an early age about your gender and our gendered world, these 12 pages are scripture. Although written in 1988, Butler presents a cogent explanation of many historical and current phenomena, and how male and female are unstable, shifting, and largely discursively established categories: how can “man” include Louis XIV’s silk stockings and Andrew Tate’s extra-tight V-neck shirts? How can “woman” both presume and chastise sexuality?
The danger of Butler’s work, its thrill, resides within these 12 pages…exemplifying knowledge’s power to challenge power itself.
Are you struggling financially, on a low income or stressed about affording parking due to the significant increases?
If you have a Low Income Health Care Card (LIHC), you are entitled to support available from the ANU and the government. This list compiles the support services available to LIHC card holders.
A LIHC is used to prove financial struggle. It is a simple process and applications typically take about 30 days to process. Instructions on how to apply for a LIHC can be found here.
To be eligible for a LIHC you must:
Make less than $783 a week.
Be 19 or older (Under 19 eligibility is possible if you’re deemed independent or eligible for Family Tax Benefit).
Be an Australian Citizen or Permanent Resident (some visas are accepted — check here).
ANU INITIATIVES
(For some reason, you must be a domestic undergrad student to access any of this. Ridiculous.)
Students can apply for ANU initiatives here. They include:
Free student life surface parking permit at ANU
$150 textbook grant a semester
$150 student support grant a semester
Free 12 months ANU Sport membership
Free Griffin Hall membership (off-campus students)
Access to Community Connect Food Relief
GOVERNMENT INITIATIVES
Free Ambulances
Free public transport off-peak: on weekdays from 9:00 am to 4:30 pm, after 6:00 pm, and all day on weekends and public holidays
100 per cent off the registration fees of your motor vehicle registration (roughly 50-60 per cent of the total amount)
Greater access to bulk-billed GPs
Access to Canberra Health Services Public Dental
$200 spectacles subsidy from participating optometrists
Access to concession rate co-payments for PBS scheduled medications ($7.70 instead of the usual $31.60 maximum cost)
PBS Safety Net reduced to $277 from the regular $1,694 (this is how much you pay for PBS medications). After you’ve spent $277 with a LIHC — further PBS medication is 100% free.
THIRD-PARTY INITIATIVES
Concession fares for Neuron scooters
P.S.
Services Australia will give you a physical card — it is made from paper. You can access a digital card from the Centrelink App.
Resources like the Community Connect Food Relief and Parking support are likely limited, so bear this in mind if applying without genuine need.
At any given moment in time, there are countless ripples travelling through spacetime, traversing the very fabric of our universe. These ripples are known as gravitational waves, and were first predicted by Albert Einstein in 1916 in his general theory of relativity.
Almost a century later in 2015, direct evidence of gravitational waves was finally obtained when the Advanced LIGO (Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory) detectors, located in Hanford, Washington and Livingston, Louisiana, USA detected the long-awaited signal.
The 0.2 second audible signal, which was described to resemble the “chirp” of a bird, was actually the product of a black hole collision. This event occurred more than 1 billion years ago. Two massive black holes merged into one, warping the fabric of spacetime and sending ripples through the universe which were eventually detected on Earth as tiny vibrations.
The successful LIGO experiment sent its own waves through the science community. The search for gravitational waves had consisted of decades of unrelenting hard work by over a thousand physicists around the globe and billions of dollars of investment, so the news was both extremely exciting and highly anticipated.
Now you might be wondering what is next for gravitational wave research. After all, the amazing detection of gravitational waves was already accomplished in 2015.
However, in reality, the exploration of gravitational waves has only just begun as researchers continue to use LIGO and a growing network of detectors around the world (e.g. LIGO-Virgo-KAGRA collaboration) to investigate the nature of our universe. In exciting news, the ANU, as part of the LIGO Scientific Collaboration (LSC), will play a central role in this global venture.
Last year I was lucky enough to get the chance to interview Dr Lilli Sun and Dr Jennie Wright, astrophysicists from ANU’s Centre for Gravitational Astrophysics to gain some further insight into the current field of gravitational wave research and ANU’s new LIGO remote control room.
Firstly, could you explain what a gravitational wave is in simple terms?
Jennie: A gravitational wave is a sort of stretching and squeezing of spacetime itself. When we have mass in the universe, it causes spacetime to curve, as explained in the theory of General Relativity. A gravitational wave is like a ripple instead of just a curve that stays still.
Lilli: You can also think of an analogy like a water wave – for example, dropping a stone in water and then seeing ripples spreading out. When we have something very heavy, like black holes that collide, they trigger those ripples in spacetime.
What are your specific research focuses and what are you currently working on?
Lilli: I do mostly astrophysics; using gravitational waves to study black holes, neutron stars, and even searching for dark matter. I do a lot of data analysis to see what the gravitational-wave signals tell us – e.g. whether it tells us that Einstein and his general theory of relativity is right or if there is something unexpected.
One of my projects is about searching for dark matter particles using gravitational waves – we don’t know if they exist or not, but analysing gravitational wave signatures is one possible way to look for them. I also work a bit on detectors, working with instrumentalists like Jennie.
Jennie: What I work on is somewhat related. I’m an instrumentalist as Lilli said, so I’m an experimental physicist and my job has two parts. Half of my time I spend at ANU, working on technologies that we can use to improve gravitational wave detectors of the future. We’re making them more sensitive so they can see further out into the universe and also can see a wider range of signal frequencies. And so, I work on developing technology that basically tries to distinguish things near the detector that look like gravitational wave sources, but actually aren’t – like a truck breaking near the detector, or just air moving near it.
The other part of my job is to help improve the current detectors. Since we use light in the gravitational wave detector to measure the stretching and squeezing of spacetime, we want to have as much light in there as possible. But, because mirrors and optical systems aren’t perfect, we sometimes lose quite a lot of light, so I look at those diagnostic measurements to try to figure out where we’re losing light.
Now that gravitational waves have already been detected, what is next for the field of gravitational wave research?
Lilli: There are many aspects actually: the 2015 discovery was only the beginning. The 2015 event for two black holes colliding into each other and the famous 2017 event for a two neutron star collision are very highlighted events, but now we are collecting many more of them including some special systems. The large number of detections will bring us important information of the population.
There are other types of gravitational waves. For example, we are looking for very faint gravitational waves from a single spinning neutron star. Neutron stars are not perfect spheres, so when they rotate they can generate very weak gravitational waves, which is something we are searching for. Another example is to probe dark matter using gravitational waves. So, we need more sensitive detectors and more of them in the network.
Moving onto the ANU remote control room, what exactly is a control room and how specifically would the remote control room work?
Jennie: So, a control room is usually a room you have next to a lab with an experiment in it: usually one that needs to be in either a really clean environment, or a slightly dangerous environment. So, you set all the physical parts of it up, so you can obtain electronic signals through to your control room that tell you what is happening. And then you can do all the data-taking and analysis from that control room.
In LIGO, they have the control rooms right next to the detector because they don’t want to be walking around next to the detector while it’s running, as they might introduce noise to it. They also have a whole bank of screens which decipher how each sub-system is working.
About the remote control room: whilst we don’t have a gravitational wave detector in Australia, many Australian scientists have been involved in gravitational wave detection from the start, and so this allows us to participate in improving the detector remotely. So, you can see on some of the screens here, I have a read-out of the different sub-systems and if they’re working correctly. For example, green tells us that they’re observing data and red tells us that they’re down and need to be fixed. And this is all in real time.
That’s really useful, because before we had this, we just had the little screen on our computers, and you had to try to view everything simultaneously and it was quite difficult. My colleagues and I will also occasionally do shifts when the detector is running, because we might have to call up people in other countries. If there’s an exciting gravitational wave event, we sometimes need to announce things to other astronomers, so they can point their telescopes to certain parts of the sky.
Lilli: Although it’s a ‘remote’ control room, you can still control some of the sub-systems of the detector. It’s just that we need to be very careful, especially during observation. There will be someone in charge in the real control room, and we can collaborate with them. The advantage of having the remote control room is that it makes it much easier for Australian colleagues, as we are not close to the detector, but we can read off the real-time information in a much more convenient way, on the other side of the world.
So, the detector isn’t always on all the time?
Jennie: There’s a trade-off between the physicists who work on improving it, and the astronomers who want to collect data using it. If you improve the sensitivity, you’re more likely to see really exciting events we haven’t seen before. But if you increase the time the detector is on for, you’re also more likely to see more events. So, there are sometimes periods where we’re not touching the detector for around 18 months, and periods where there is no data collection for a year, and maintenance and upgrading occurs.
From a bigger perspective, what role is Australia and ANU playing in the further research of gravitational waves?
Lilli: Australia is one of the major collaborators in the large international LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA collaboration. There is a large group here working on gravitational wave astrophysics and detector science. These days, Australian scientists also want to propose and work towards building an Australian detector in the future, which is pretty exciting.
Right now, we are also thinking about the next generation detectors – like what kind of design and technology is needed that can give us a one-order of magnitude increase in sensitivity, which can get us much deeper into the universe. Australian colleagues are working on both the existing science of gravitational waves, but also the future.
Jennie: In the past, Australia has developed sub-systems which are now used in the detector, contributing mirrors for example. Also, Lilli is in charge of the calibration group for LIGO, and that’s just an example, but we have a lot of staff in Australia who are leading some aspect of the LIGO scientific collaboration’s research. We’ve also been instrumental in the design of something called the Squeezer which is used in LIGO to improve its sensitivity, making the detectors the quantum instruments that they are.
Lilli: Regarding astrophysics and data analysis, there are quite a few large groups from different Australian universities within OzGrav working on the data being collected these days. A lot of studies are carried out in Australia, but we also work very closely with international colleagues.
What are some benefits of these large-scale projects, e.g. do they help bring countries closer together and encourage international cooperation?
Lilli: I think yes, definitely. These days, it’s getting difficult to do small narrow research projects by yourself. With projects like gravitational wave detectors, you have large instruments, and that involves many different aspects: you need to work with engineers on different sub-systems, theoretical physicists to understand how the astrophysics work, software engineers and data analysts for dealing with huge amounts of data, and also astronomers who do different kinds of follow-up observations. All these people are playing important roles, and they come from different countries, different parts of the world. Close collaboration is critical.
Jennie: I think it’s really useful to have these big projects, because any falling out between countries can get in the way. It also definitely broadened my horizons, as I’m from Scotland, which isn’t as multicultural. Without science, I definitely wouldn’t have travelled and experienced different cultures as much.
Last question, what’s your advice for students looking to get into this field or just interested in your research?
Lilli: I think there are lots of chances for students to talk to us and do small projects. If they’re really interested there are lots of ways to get into the field. We do lots of summer/winter projects and we also teach undergraduate courses, where we discuss gravitational waves at a more basic level. Many students are interested, and we have extended discussions and they come to us for small projects or Honours and end up staying for PhD.
Jennie: I think definitely the best way is just to email someone who works in the fields. Academics love students being interested in their research, otherwise they wouldn’t be working at a university and teaching. I’m really happy whenever a student asks me, and I think that’s how I got involved in the field too.
Lilli: Yes, definitely talk to academics and lecturers in the field if you’re interested.
Jennie: And I think that’s the same in all areas of science as well, people are super keen to tell you about their research, you just have to ask them.
Photograph of some of the screens in the control room.
Dr Jennie Wright (left) and Dr Lilli Sun (right) in the remote control room.
A huge thank you to Dr Lilli Sun and Dr Jennie Wright for taking the time to do an interview and for so generously sharing their knowledge.
Comments Off on Eight Years Later: Schmidt’s Legacy
On the last day of the mid-semester break, campus is quiet when we sit down with Brian Schmidt. The brown brick Chancellery building is not a hub of student activity, and as we walk over it appears a bit like ANU’s own Battersea power station. Inside, it has been done up in traditional Australian colours: rusty red, muted orange, yellow here and there, brown wood panelling, and a soft sense of beige. As we wait in the lobby, the building feels a bit empty, except for when someone walks through and jumps into the elevator.
The tranquillity is pierced, but not broken, by ANU’s departing Vice-Chancellor and Nobel laureate, Brian Schmidt. He is not loud, but passionate, and he has a lot to say on a lot of things. But most notably, he is an arm-waver. As he speaks, every concept is given a corresponding gesture. Dwelling on the aim of an inclusive community, he swings his arms out wide, and when he waves off criticism about large capital purchases, he points to where the two purchases sit, beyond the office and the gum trees outside.
In February this year, at his State of the University speech, Schmidt announced that this year would be his last in the role and that he will be returning to research and teaching. It is hard to know if Schmidt’s status as a cultural icon comes from who he is, or from his last name, which has proved endlessly punnable for ANU students.
Having spent eight years in the top full-time position at the University, he is tired of the work.
When we ask him about his pay, which is less than most other Vice-Chancellors in the country, he is clear that he would never be a Vice-Chancellor at another university, and that he did this for the ANU. Of course, he is still paid in the ballpark of $500,000. He argues there would be a “disequilibrium” if he were paid less than the people he hires, and the people he hires are paid around that much.
Schmidt is distinctly American as well. Listening to this thick accent while tall gum trees sway outside, with classic Canberra pollen in the air, feels slightly anachronistic. It extends beyond his accent though. When he speaks of his aims as Vice-Chancellor, it is about putting ANU in the same league as other word-class institutions. The first that comes to him is Harvard. When he discusses inclusion on campus, he does so in a distinctly American liberal tone: disagreeing with what may be said, but defending people’s right to say it.
As we begin to ask Schmidt about his time at the ANU, the first thing that becomes apparent is his candour.
He wants to talk about the areas where the ANU is not doing well.
We open by asking him if he is excited to return to a quieter pace of life, and he is quick to describe the job as relentless, throwing his life out of balance. There is, he says, a lot of unpleasantness to it. To explain further, he uses what sounds like a frequent anecdote: 20,000 people come to the ANU everyday, and most people work 20,000 days in their life, meaning that everyday is bound to be the best day of one person’s life and the worst day of someone else’s. And he estimates they deal with one out of ten people who are having the worst day of their life. Throughout the interview he returns to the issue of sexual assault, and it seems he sometimes has to address events like this. He admits that this includes executing the procedural fairness of the university.
The Long View
With a mammoth institution like the ANU, it is difficult to know what gives it momentum and what can push it to change course. Schmidt says his focus has always been on students, despite the expectation that as an academic he would focus on research. In his eyes, his impact has been to give the campus and the University’s research “the foundation of a vibrant student community,” including a distinctly Australian undergraduate experience. ANU, he believes, may lack the “gold plating” of Harvard, but he maintains that
“if you get a degree from ANU, it’s as good as a Harvard degree.”
Schmidt attended Harvard for his postgraduate and then taught at the ANU, so he is better placed to comment on the two universities than most. But ANU did slip this year in the Global QS rankings, suggesting that the gold plating may not be the only thing ANU is missing. Schmidt has clearly thought about this or at least had this discussion before. He rejects the methodology of rankings, like QS or Times Higher Education, arguing they don’t reflect the ANU’s mission. He says the focus should be on students’ experiences on campus, and that Quilt surveys show that ANU students have good experiences on campus, better than most other Australian universities. He also questions the methodology, asking rhetorically how something like QS can measure satisfaction better than Quilt. The value of ANU lies in breaking people out of their “high school clique” and exposing them to the diversity of Australia. Schmidt believes on-campus life and ANU scholarships and programs achieves this.
Some ANU students may reject this characterisation of the on-campus experience. ANU has one of the lowest enrollment rates for low socioeconomic students, and the interstate move for many students presents a cost barrier not often found at other major universities. On-campus rent is itself more expensive than off-campus, further alienating the people who Schmidt wants to include. But, this may also reflect the growing cost of tertiary education in Australia, as higher inflation means that HECS has now become an important, if not crippling, debt for many young people.
The government, in Schmidt’s eyes, is not doing enough to support inclusivity and diversity across the sector, but to him ANU is doing more than most,
in an area where it matters more.
When he talks about inclusion, Schmidt means more than just making students feel included. He chastises the idea that certain people should not be allowed to speak at the ANU, and he is clearly frustrated when he brings up the example of Michele Bullock’s address. Bullock, now the Reserve Bank Governor, gave an address on campus which was briefly interrupted by students who said that if unemployment had to increase to reduce inflation, Bullock’s job should be the first to go. Holding an enlarged Jobseeker application form, the students walked past the stage, yelling with a megaphone, before being escorted out. As he explains his philosophy on free speech, he echoes historian Evelyn Hall’s famous quote, often attributed to Voltaire: “I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.”
Schmidt’s line of thinking fits into the broader issue of free speech on university campuses across the anglophone world. In Britain, the US and here, many controversial speakers have had events brought to a standstill by students protesting. The subject matter of the speakers has ranged, from Malcolm Turnbull at the University of Sydney, to transphobic speakers and academics. Schmidt wants students to ask hard questions, not stand up and shout, or to protest outside the event. Of course, a student asking a question gets probably half a minute of airtime, someone like Bullock gets the full hour.
More Recently
Serving as Vice-Chancellor for eight years – two four year terms – Schmidt has gone round the block more than a few times. His second term, though, was dominated by COVID-19, which presented a short-term and a long-term challenge. With one of the largest on-campus populations in the country, ANU administered its own lockdown. This presented immediate issues, from food provision for students living with communal kitchens or eateries, as well as the money spent on Rapid Antigen Tests and personal protective equipment. Part of the ANU lockdown involved Senior Residents distributing food to rooms, something they were not paid for and which led to protests, especially from Burton and Garran Hall. He noted the pay freeze agreed to in early 2020 as an example of a hard decision he had to make about the University’s staff: had staff not agreed to it, he says he would have had to make 90 more staff redundant.
In the long term, COVID-19 tightened the belt of ANU, and Schmidt has found that the financial constrictions stemming from the pandemic have impacted everything they do. “It’s one thing,” he says, “just being flat, but
it’s another thing having pressure to become smaller and… it’s not an easy place to be squeezed.”
There is, for him, no easy way to make things work. With staff enterprise bargaining having concluded this year, one of the centre points of the debate was how much the ANU could afford to pay.
Schmidt, from his own description, was not a diehard unionist before he became Vice-Chancellor, he only took note of union opposition to hiring young researchers, chiefly because he was a young researcher. However, he now sees the value in having the views and values of staff represented, because otherwise “there’s no one to talk to and you can’t actually get a sensible agreement.” But, he follows this up with an admonishment of what he calls “the theatre of the strike…
call it whatever you want, it’s theatre from my perspective.”
He doesn’t see the cause for the half-day strike, which, with around 300 participants, was one of the largest protests on campus in the last few years. He claims that it didn’t matter in the end, as the bargaining ended up where he wanted it to, although he would have taken the first deal: a payrise of about 16% over five years (compared to the 18% in the final deal). He believes that on casualisation, he was offering terms that were “far more exciting” than the language “that the Melbourne union office was using.”
Key Issues
Another recurring challenge for him, and for university administration across the country, has been sexual assault and harassment (SASH). Last year, the National Student Safety Survey (NSSS) found that ANU had the second-highest rate of assault in the nation, and the highest of all Group of Eight universities. This year saw the establishment of the Student Safety and Wellbeing Committee (SSWC), which Schmidt points out is the only committee of its stature – reporting directly to ANU Council – in the country. Last year the University also established the Student Safety and Wellbeing Team to provide assistance for students and to walk them through the often quite complex processes of the University. These are two key student demands that the ANU has met, and Schmidt is now “much more comfortable” with the position and work that the University is doing on SASH.
Sexual assault in the university sector is more likely to happen the more people live on campus, and Schmidt both understands that ANU has substantial work to do, but also thinks that ANU’s on-campus nature contributes to its poor performance. However, this is not an excuse for him, and he believes it only increases the University’s responsibility. With the SSWC reporting to the Council and having both students and sexual violence experts sit on it, it is likely that ANU is entering a new era in reform around SASH. Whether the University takes up the committee’s recommendations, will be the work of the next Vice-Chancellor. Earlier this year, Woroni reported on the ANU’s failure to progress its Disability Access Plan; it remains to be seen if the University has learnt from its mistakes.
Another alleged mistake the ANU, and Schmidt personally, are often charged with is the purchase of large capital assets to be developed in the future. In 2021, he oversaw the purchase of a $17 million disused bus stop from the ACT, and this year he announced another similarly large purchase of a parking lot to build a new health sciences precinct on. Schmidt denies that the purchases are too expensive, noting that the cost of the acquisitions are amortised to be paid over a number of years and that the land will be used to realise the University’s long-term goals. He also says the purchases were a drop in the ocean compared to the pay rises the NTEU demanded.
The conversation next turned to the ANU’s involvement in AUKUS, which Schmidt denies: “It’s news to me.” Schmidt made a point not often discussed by students which is that the ANU, as the national university, ought to meet the educational needs of government policy. Hence, if there is to be a nuclear-powered submarine program, and Schmidt does not express his views on the alliance itself, then the ANU should provide the requisite education. It’s a reason which doesn’t seem to always be applied evenly at the University, which attempted to cut its Bachelor of Public Policy (BPP) last year, a degree which surely aligns to the government’s interests, even if broader society may not care. Of course, the BPP does not map onto any specific government policy, but one can imagine that if any university is to teach it, it should be the ANU, along similar lines to Schmidt’s thinking.
Education and research into nuclear energy and nuclear-powered submarines is also part of successful nuclear stewardship, Schmidt believes. This argument is a bit more familiar to students, with speakers at the student union arguing that there is a space for nuclear research. However, the controversy revolves around the conditions of any AUKUS-related scholarship that the Department of Defence offers. Will recipients be expected to work on AUKUS submarines, and what steps will be taken to ensure the education can’t be easily applied to nuclear armament? Without more details, these are moot questions, and we will have to wait until the scholarship program is formally announced.
No one person can accomplish everything, so what would Schmidt like to have achieved as Vice-Chancellor but never did? An academic overlay in on-campus residences, something he promises he’ll work on after his term, and hence tells us to stay tuned for. The second aim is more equity scholarships. The goal “is that every person who needs a scholarship in first year should get one.” ANU has a growing asset pool, and it may be that, like Harvard, Schmidt wants to fund equity scholarships from this pool. He doesn’t pull his punches though, and says the federal government could do more to fund tertiary education.
Looking Forward
On Tuesday the 26th August, ANU announced that Professor Genevieve Bell would be its 13th Vice-Chancellor. She will be the first woman in the position, and Schmidt mentioned his passion for a more equitable hiring as Vice-Chancellor. Bell, like Schmidt, comes from the ANU, however she has worked as the Director of the School of Cybernetics, a more administrative role than academic. But, her experience in computing and anthropology makes her well-poised to lead the University in the age of AI, or at least the age of paranoia around AI.
Schmidt’s advice for Bell is clear: “Get out and talk to people, talk to students, include the students in the decision making that affects them.” At the conclusion of our interview, Schmidt mentioned that he doesn’t want to be an “alien overlord” believing that Vice-Chancellors must be “a part of the community, not an alien overlord.” Schmidt can be seen around Kambri fairly frequently, including in the queue at Daily Market. Having provided the name of ANU Schmidtposting, the ANU community’s largest online community, he is in a sense, instantly recognisable, and understood to be a part of the ANU. Whether he seems like a member of the ANU community is up to the reader.
I grew up in the Western Suburbs of Sydney, a place not many ANU students are from. Looking back on high school there, even though it wasn’t the best period in my life, it made me feel like I somewhat belonged. There was always a new club for me to join and I had a great group of friends, who never made me feel isolated for the things I found interesting. Maybe it was because of all those American college movies I had watched growing up, and all those YouTube videos I had watched in anticipation, but I believed that university would be the place where I became more confident and grew into myself. I assumed university would make me feel like I completely belonged.
I had two weeks of the ‘University experience’ before COVID-19 hit, but it was nothing like I expected. That first week of uni, I remember printing out my resume and immediately applying for every job in sight. I assumed every student was doing the same. I was sorely mistaken.
According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, only 40% of people in tertiary education are working part-time. I was surprised when I found out that some students at ANU have never had to work, and will not have to work throughout their entire degree, to take care of themselves. This made me feel like an imposter at ANU, acutely out of place at such a prestigious university.
My first tutorial at ANU also made me feel like I was out of place. The way tutors speak is something that still perplexes me to this day. I felt like I was sitting in a Master’s program for International Relations, not my first ever uni class. I believe lots of ANU students have felt this, as I often see it plastered all over ANU Confessions. Some lecturers do not know how to teach and they can often make the course feel inaccessible. It became even more difficult over COVID-19 when everything was online; it was even harder to learn. For example, I took a French Introduction course, thinking it would be a pretty simple class. I had taken a little French in high school and thought I would have an advantage, – I was wrong. The lecturer attempted to teach a whole year of high school French in a few weeks!
There seems to be a pervasive expectation at ANU that University is our only priority, and ANU continually fails to take into account the complex and busy lives of its students. According to the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, in 2017 – 2018, 15% of people ages 18-24 had experienced high levels of psychological distress. With the impact of COVID-19, I know that this would have increased. As a student who works part-time and suffers from psychological distress, I can attest that the help provided by ANU is minuscule. Because of this, it is so easy to feel like you do not belong, or feel out of place. That first year of university impacted how I saw myself. The thing about imposter syndrome is, everything you feel about yourself is tipped on its head. The way you perceive yourself and the people around you is completely different. You internalise it and feel like you are the only one feeling this way – as if you are the only person who is in the wrong place.
Imposter syndrome also makes you feel like you are in a constant race to keep up, and ANU reinforces that toxic narrative.
Have you ever noticed that most tutorials seem to be during the middle of the day, making it difficult to work and study at the same time? Some lecturers, even after COVID-19, still expect students to go to their lectures in-person and you may even lose participation points if you do not attend. I do not have time to go to a three-hour lecture on a Monday morning, especially when it’s a day I work. ANU perpetuates the pressure to keep up with your peers, you need to graduate when everyone else graduates, you need to get HDs, and you need to be prefect, mentally and physically
When you break them down, though, none of these goals make sense. When it comes to graduating ‘on time’, people change their degrees, I know, shocking! When you do that, you often end up extending the time you need to study before graduating. Many people also do fewer courses to work or take care of their mental health, which also extends their degrees. It feels like to finish your degree perfectly in three or four years would mean that you didn’t work, and never had a mental breakdown, ever!
Moving on to pressure to get all D’s or HDs, not all courses are the same, also shocking! Unless you have done the course already, you do not know what to expect. Your tutor might be a harsh marker and maybe the last exam is really hard for no reason. When you take a look again at these societal expectations that make everyone feel like they are doing something wrong, you realise that they do not make any sense. Many students take time off here and there, many students are working multiple jobs to afford to stay in Canberra and many students are simply trying to pass their courses and survive.
The one thing imposter syndrome has taught me was that it is easy to idealise everyone around you and look down on yourself, what is more difficult is to treat yourself with kindness and remember that this path in life is your own and no one else’s. Tertiary systems also need to look at every student as an individual and provide more financial and mental resources. While I do not believe that uni will ever get easier, especially if ANU continues to forget about the welfare of their students, I do believe that the communities students have created, such as ANU Confessions and ANU Schmidtposting will continue to bring us comfort, so we never fully feel alone.
Comments Off on Editorial | Support your teachers, support the strikes
On Thursday of Bush Week, the 27th of July, ANU staff will strike for better pay, working conditions, and to reverse the casualisation so rampant in the tertiary sector. The students of this University have an obligation to stand in solidarity with staff: we must support our teachers, we must support the strikes.
One of the most important jobs in society is educating future generations. And yet, our society pays the most socially useful jobs, some of the lowest wages, and lecturers and tutors are no different. They are underpaid, under-supported and overworked. Burdened not by our assessments, questions, and debates, but by the ever-increasing administrative work of the University. They are stretched thin, and to add insult to injury, they are screwed over by the ANU.
The National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU) has brought several key demands to the bargaining table. Some have seen success, as Woroni has previously reported. But, where university management remains most intransigent is exactly where change is needed most. Our teachers deserve to be paid more, more because of how valuable their work is, more because of how difficult it is, and more because of the cost-of-living crisis that they must struggle through.
The ANU recently revised its previous paltry pay rise. Despite the overall increase this still includes an administrative pay rise from earlier this year, and ignores the pay rise due from 2022. The University has remained stubbornly opposed to giving casual employees – often fellow undergraduate and postgraduate students marking assessments and teaching tutorials – clear paths to permanent work. Casual research assistants are often paid from research funding grants, and the dilemma between claiming the full hours worked and eating into the research budget of a supposedly research-based university is real. Such casual work is rife with exploitation.
Capitalist ideology preaches the ultimate freedom of the market. The ultimate freedom of the worker is to strike for better conditions, to stand in solidarity and withhold the most valuable part of the production process: human labour. But capitalism does not practise what it preaches, and industrial action is increasingly curtailed, while corporate freedom – from profiteering to monopolisation and downright fraud – remains untouchable. In this climate, every strike reiterates the importance and power of workers, even as those workers are straw manned as “intellectual elites.” ANU staff should strike, so that they can reassert their power as the foundation of this University.
Students are familiar by now with the paradox of apparently being the customer of the University, and yet constantly having their demands rejected, their voices ignored. When we stand in solidarity with staff, we remind the University that it is not run by vice-chancellors or deputy vice-chancellors who want to cut degrees. We remind them that hardworking teachers and students are the lifeblood of this University. The relationship between the student and the teacher is the nexus of learning and education, this relationship cannot exist when teachers cannot live off their wages.
Our University’s status is slipping. We’re no longer amongst the top-ranking universities in Australia, and our research funding has fallen, driving lower revenues. Our University increasingly leans into predatory, exploitative systems of revenue generation. From dodgy financing deals leading to drastic rent-increases to prosecuting students over parking fines, it is creating a conflict between the institution and the person, whether they be student or staff. Higher pay and better support for staff is going to improve learning outcomes, not spending $17 million on a health precinct when the researchers to work there are not paid enough.
The corporatisation of the University goes hand in hand with poorer working standards. As managerial and finance-sector thinking has infiltrated the tertiary sector, staff have seen themselves lumped with more and more administrative work. Even as the genuinely helpful administrative work, such as special considerations and accessibility concerns, is still considered voluntary.
Woroni is a proudly independent media outlet, but on this, we agree with ANUSA: staff working conditions are student learning conditions. If we won’t stand in solidarity with teachers out of principle, then we can at least support them knowing that the better paid they are and the more flexible their work is, the better it will be for us.
Take just one example: assessment marking. Often, casual staff are paid per assessment marked, or paid per hour with the expectation that they mark a certain number of assessments in that time. Both practices drive markers to spend less time on each assessment, increasing the likelihood of unfair marks on students. The NTEU demand for pathways out of casualisation can help ensure markers are not pressured and exploited, and that students’ assessments are not rushed through.
And in turn, solidarity begets solidarity. Rent for next year has increased again, meaning that the cheapest student accommodation now exceeds the average rent one person pays living in a three bedroom sharehouse. We are seeing continued cuts in degrees and changes to the curriculum that remove the flexibility so many students desire. ANU has the highest sexual assault rate of any Group of Eight university. If we stand with staff, they will stand with us at our next protest. Stand with no one, and no one stands with you.
It is unclear how the staff strikes will progress from Bush Week. In other, more corporate universities like the University of Sydney, the strikes continued for months. Since the ANU NTEU branch announced its intent to strike, the ANU has moved forward on some issues. But, if management digs its heel in, we may see strikes throughout Semester 2. We may see picket lines and multi-day strikes and as frustrating as some may find these, it is our obligation to support better standards for educators. Staff will already be under pressure to compromise and give in to the University’s demands. Students have an obligation to stand with staff, to remove the guilt-tripping and emotional argument and say that no, strikes do not negatively impact students, not in the long run.
Support your teachers, turn out to the rally on the 27th of July. Don’t complain when class is cancelled because of industrial action, let your striking teachers know you support them, that you want this too. Remind the University who really matters.
Support the strikes.
The students of this University have an obligation to stand in solidarity with staff: we must support our teachers, we must support the strikes.
Comments Off on On Thin Portraits and the Incurable Brilliance of Zelda Fitzgerald: Her Life and Masterpiece, ‘Save Me the Waltz’
“Nobody has measured, not even poets, how much the heart can hold.”
—Zelda Fitzgerald, Save Me the Waltz
There are exactly two things that I know for certain:
The first is that wholemeal bagels are a direct result of the rapidly dissolving integrity of the human species, and the second is that Zelda Fitzgerald was brilliant. A perpetually unrecognised genius.
Zelda’s first and only novel Save Me the Waltz (1932) is semi-autobiographical and, like Scott’s later Tender is the Night, predominantly written about the period during the 1920s which the Fitzgeralds and their contemporaries spent in Paris. It is the lesser-known of the pair, but certainly not the less valuable for it. The novel was written by Zelda in a creative fervour of six weeks while institutionalised for schizophrenia (whether or not she actually suffered with schizophrenia is debated—her “breakdowns” are often attributed to bipolar disorder, or alternatively depression or anxiety). When Scott initially discovered its existence, he was furious; his letters, notably to friends including Ernest Hemingway, and industry figures such as editor Max Perkins, disclose his anger at her depiction of him. In a letter with Zelda’s psychiatrist, he wrote:
“My God, my books made her a legend and her single intention in this somewhat thin portrait is to make me a nonentity.” –Scott, in a letter to Zelda’s psychiatrist
Originally written, to quote Scott, as a “thin portrait” of their marriage and their characters, in Zelda’s early drafts she went to the lengths of naming the love interest “Amory Blaine” after Scott’s autobiographical protagonist in This Side of Paradise. Afraid that the book would damage his reputation, and angry that she had chosen to write based on the same period of their lives as his then-unfinished Tender is the Night, he convinced her to rewrite it. Eventually, he helped her to edit and publish the novel, and praised its quality. But not before she had made significant changes, which she didn’t appear to resent, and on which we can only trust her judgement as the competent and intelligent writer she has painstakingly proven herself to be.
Save Me the Waltz offers, for the first time, some real insight into the glamorous and turbulent marriage of the Fitzgeralds, as well as Zelda’s thoughts, feelings, and character, beyond what is shown to us in Scott’s work. The female love interests throughout his fiction are, by his own confession, thin portraits of her, his muse. On their marriage, he told a reporter, “I married the heroine of my stories.” At times, he lifted entire passages from her diaries and letters, which Zelda playfully notes in her review of The Beautiful and Damned.
“Mr. Fitzgerald—I believe that’s how he spells his name—seems to believe that plagiarism begins at home.” –Zelda Fitzgerald, in The New York Tribune
Zelda Fitzgerald has been often viewed as “the original flapper,” “jazz baby,” “wild child.” Rarely “writer,” “artist,” “dancer.” In marrying Scott, she “unknowingly sealed her fate as a symbolic being…as the quintessential muse, artist’s wife, and, eventually, doomed woman—a brilliant but mercurial talent whose public persona subsumed the identity she herself attempted to create and control” (Lawson, 2015).
Scott opposed most of Zelda’s creative endeavours; he discouraged her work in ballet, and actively tried to prevent the publishing of her book in its early stages. In Save Me the Waltz, protagonist Alabama Beggs’ husband (David Knight) openly disapproves of her dancing, probably reflective of the author’s own situation. David is a successful painter—thinly replacing Scott’s writing—and refuses to acknowledge Alabama as an artist equal to himself. I don’t believe or mean to suggest that Scott was fundamentally a bad person, or a woman-hater. But he was a romantic, an idealist, and he was validated by the standards of the time in his expectation of a romantic relationship with the dynamic of female muse for the male artist—a tale as old as time, an idea which hasn’t been disrupted or challenged until comparatively recently. He built up an expectation which she fulfilled—friends noted how he would hang on her words, scribble down her comments at parties. She was the heroine of his stories, and things were good, so long as she could be reduced to something two-dimensional, and could be distilled into beautiful words and pressed onto white pages.
But then there was the problem of her incurable brilliance, her capacity as expansive as his for creation. In fact, she excelled in ballet and painting and writing. When she wanted to create, she became something more than the heroine of his stories, rejecting the expectations he had so fancifully set. And this, I think, is where their problems began—assisted, of course, by the excessive drinking, affairs, and inadequate mental health care courtesy of the time.
The overwhelming majority of the—sorely limited—critical attention Save Me the Waltz received on and since its publication has been negative; in the preface of the second edition of Save Me the Waltz, Zelda’s writing ability is called merely “surface level,” (Moore, 1966) repeating the oft-cited criticism of her unusual use of language.
But it is her fantastically imaginative language that makes her writing so wildly unique, so fantastically appealing.
“The rain spun and twisted the light of their third wedding anniversary to thin prismatic streams; alto rain, soprano rain, rain for Englishmen and farmers, rubber rain, metal rain, crystal rain.”
Especially towards the beginning of the novel, she writes to disorientate—metaphors composed of borderline-nonsense; surrealist imagery; wacky, Zelda-devised turns of phrase to make your head spin. And it is truly, utterly captivating.
Caught inside Zelda’s words are feelings of bewilderment, joy, fractured relationships, obsession, hedonism, and beneath it all, a fight for a sense of self. Her style, regularly criticised as unpolished, simultaneously confronts the reader with the glamorous, playful ‘Jazz Age’ and its contorted underbelly of subtle misogyny and the imbalanced perception of one’s own identity.
“He pulled himself intermittently to pieces, showered himself in fragments above her head.”
“She crawled into the friendly cave of his ear. The area inside was grey and ghostly classic as she stared about the deep trenches of the cerebellum. There was not a growth nor a flowery substance to break those smooth convolutions, just the puffy rise of sleek gray matter. ‘I’ve got to see the front lines,” Alabama said to herself. The lumpy mounds rose wet above her head and she set out following the creases. Before long she was lost. Like a mystic maze the folds and ridges rose in desolation; there was nothing to indicate one way from another. She stumbled on and finally reached the medulla oblongata. Vast tortuous indentations led her round and round. Hysterically, she began to run. David, distracted by a tickling sensation at the head of his spine, lifted his lips from hers.”
“Outside the wide doors of the country club they pressed their bodies against the cosmos, the jibberish of jazz, the black heat from the greens in the hollow like people making an imprint for a cast of humanity. They swam in the moonlight that varnished the land like a honey-coating and David swore and cursed the collars of his uniforms and rode all night to the rifle range rather than give up his hours after supper with Alabama. They broke the beat of the universe to measures of their own conceptions and mesmerised themselves with its precious thumping.”
Perhaps even more remarkable than the stylistic depth and character of Zelda’s writing is the means by which she presents the feminine search for self within the early 20th century. Throughout Save Me the Waltz, Zelda uses mirrors as tools for the female pursuit of creative, intellectual, and emotional identity, in a blink-and-you-miss-it subversion of what may be considered the traditional notion of mirrors as tools for female vanity.
Zelda conveys the intrinsic dislocated sense of identity within her protagonist from an early age through mirrors and reflections, introducing the idea towards the beginning of the novel.
“She ran her fingers tentatively through her breast pocket, staring pessimistically at her reflection. ‘The feet look as if they were somebody else’s,’ she said. ‘But maybe it’ll be all right.’”
To David’s displeasure, Alabama takes up ballet during her late twenties, where she dances incessantly in a room filled with floor-to-ceiling mirrors, Zelda thus skillfully entwines Alabama’s near unhealthy compulsion to dance with her unyielding search for identity. It grows into an obsession; a relentless cycle of eating, sleeping, and breathing ballet, despite—or perhaps in part driven by—her husband’s criticism. Alabama’s disjointed sense of self is once again presented in a separation from the psychological and the physical, the mirror and the mind in conflict.
“…she thought her breasts hung like old English dugs. It did not show in the mirror. She was nothing but sinew. To succeed had become an obsession.”
However, before there was ballet, there was David, and Alabama initially sought to find herself in him; she feels that being with him is like “gazing into her own eyes”. But this perception of him becomes “distorted,” having warped her own view of him in a fervent attempt to find meaning within herself.
“So much she loved the man, so close and closer she felt herself that he became distorted in her vision, like pressing her nose upon a mirror and gazing into her own eyes.”
David, however, only looks in a mirror once in the entire novel, in stark contrast with Alabama’s dozens of times, and it culminates in his being “pleased to find himself complete.” Complete. Assured of his identity, recognised as an artist, an individual, certain of his place in the world.
“He verified himself in the mirror…as if he had taken inventory of himself before leaving and was pleased to find himself complete.”
For me, Save Me the Waltz is both joy and melancholy. I wonder if Alabama—which is to say Zelda Fitzgerald herself—ever found what she was looking for. I wonder if, after all the parties and all the laughter, and the breakdowns and the fame and the starlit revelry, she found something that fulfilled her. I hope in her painting, and her dancing, and her writing, she came to some understanding within herself about her world, and her place in it—an understanding that I also hope brought her security and strength of identity.
And so, I’ll leave you with one final urge to pick up the magnum opus of Zelda Fitzgerald (writer, artist, dancer).
Love,
Caelan xxx
Lawson, Ashley. “The Muse and the Maker: Gender, Collaboration, and Appropriation in the Life and Work of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald.” The F. Scott Fitzgerald Review, vol. 13, no. 1, 2015, pp. 76–109.
Moore, H,T. 1966, Preface in: Fitzgerald, Z. Save Me the Last Dance.
There are exactly two things that I know for certain: The first is that wholemeal bagels are a direct result of the rapidly dissolving integrity of the human species, and the second is that Zelda Fitzgerald was brilliant. A perpetually unrecognised genius.
Sometimes traipsing around Canberra I feel haunted by an unreal ghost. The spectre is an unknowable woman, but one whose presence I feel like a current of electricity always.
The ghost’s name is Kate, and she attended the ANU in 1984. She lived raucously and radiantly, testing limits of appropriateness, in existential opposition to ‘The Man’. She bleached her hair to a frizzy and discoloured bird’s nest, wore exclusively second-hand clothes and was most often accompanied by a misbehaved and clumsily oversized dalmation.
Beyond graduation, Kate had an equally remarkable and passionate life. She eventually had a daughter, who now attends the same ANU, and who lives in perpetual wistfulness about this version of her mother whom she will never meet. I’ve heard many stories centring Kate as protagonist. Through these histories, I know her to be bold and outrageous and someone I think I would’ve liked to befriend.
On the day I was born Kate became Mum. She describes the transition as cataclysmic –suddenly she looked down at the crying, clawing lump of purple flesh in her arms, and knew that this infant was the most precious thing in the world. Where Kate was irresponsible and chaotic, Mum was completely dedicated to the lives and wellbeing of her children. She says the best thing she ever did in her life was her children and they are her proudest accomplishment. The loss of Kate was worth the gain of Rose and Natalie, according to Mum.
I describe Mum’s devotion to me and my sister as selfless in the sense that she sacrificed parts of herself to be our mother. The pressure placed on mothers to deprioritise aspects of their life, like their career, friendships and hobbies, is too frequently dismissed as part and parcel of motherhood. Motherhood is sacrifice – to be a ‘good’ mother you must sacrifice. Mum first, self second. My Mum is selfless in the sense that upon my birth Mum took precedence over Kate.
Whether brainwashed by hormones or not, Mum was completely enraptured with my infant self, and gladly devoted herself to motherhood. I am so indebted to her for her wholehearted commitment to this identity. My childhood was one smothered with love and gentleness. My mother let me try every sport, musical instrument or obscure hobby that I became interested in on a whim, despite my tendency to give up immediately. She came to every school assembly and cheered for me and my participation awards.
Mum is supportive, caring, generous and the most patient and loving person I know. It’s hard to see much of myself in that. I consider that I must be more like Kate, maybe if only for the fact that we both came to the same university, in the same city, through the same years of our lives.
Kate used to sing at Tilley’s in Lyneham, back when it was a lesbian club, while I now order soy lattes from the same venue. Kate had drinks in Union Court with her friends after class, which I do too, and modelled nude for students at the School of Art (another shared profession). She had shitty boyfriends, fought with her parents and sometimes she was reckless just because it was fun. She cycled down University Ave; studied at Chifley and attended classes in AD Hope and Copland. Balancing work and university made her stressed, not that she was particularly studious or dedicated to her work in bars, but she cut loose often and wholeheartedly.
Kate and myself, though we never met, have much in common. While at ANU we both cried in an academic office, both had too much to drink on too many occasions, both failed a course and both found ourselves at times in and out of love and lust. There is a closeness between us which extends beyond the superficialities of two twenty-something women. We feared and hoped for the same things, for ourselves and others, share the same hurts and frustrations.
Kate had the light in the 1980s and she was celestial.
I have the light now and though I think my shine might be dull in comparison to hers, I love my youth. I love coming home at all hours, having spent the night doing whatever with whomever. I love that the only person I have to take care of is myself, and that I can generally get away with only doing that to a passing grade of fifty percent.
When I float through Canberra I wonder if she felt the same freedom. I wonder if she felt the power in her beauty and trappings of youth that I do, or if she would have sneered at my vanity. At my age, like me, she never wanted to be a mother. Like me, she feared the sacrifice of her personhood and the weight of that responsibility. She never imagined losing Kate to Mum and likewise I cannot imagine myself under any other name than Rose. We both could never see ourselves choosing someone else over our own self-absorption and joyful recklessness, and yet one of us did.
The connection I feel to the unknowable Kate is spiritual and I carry her with me through every Canberra moment that we share. It sometimes feels as if I could bump into her at a party at an inner-north share house or sit down next to her in a sociology tutorial. I am enchanted by the woman I’ll never know, simultaneously mythologising and mourning her.
My Mum is brilliant and wild and known for her energy and authenticity. I would never mean to insinuate she became dull when she became Mum. But it’s true that Kate, in a way, died when Rose and Mum were born. It’s not a sad thing but I still long to meet her, the version of my mother who was just like me but brighter.
This distance between mother and daughter is essential of course. Mum says Kate would not have been a good mother and I believe her because I believe I also would make for an appalling and neglectful parent. But at twenty-two years old I would not look to Kate for her maternity. I would look to her in reverence of Mum and all that she sacrificed for me. I would look to her in veneration of youth and its joys. I would look to her and she to me as mother and daughter, seeing each other in ourselves and ourselves in each other.
Originally published in Woroni Vol. 72 Issue 5 ‘Cum As You Are’
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