Comments Off on Can we please talk about Canberra Avenue now?
Canberra Avenue, the road that runs from central Queanbeyan to Parliament House, has four lanes, a wide median strip, and measures about 45 meters wide from curb to curb. It has a speed limit of 60 kilometres per hour.
But, despite adjoining schools and homes, it has almost no signalised crossings for pedestrians between Manuka and the New South Wales border.
Even when people follow the road rules along Canberra Avenue, it is extremely dangerous, and people have known this for years. At my high school, St Edmund’s College, or Eddies, which is located at 110 Canberra Avenue, it was something of a villain.
When crossing the street around the Eddies campus, you are confronted with various dangers.
Cars are moving much faster than they would elsewhere.
Looking east (away from the City), the road goes up a slight gradient, blocking your view of traffic coming off a giant, fast-moving roundabout.
Looking west (towards the City), tree branches can block your view of traffic coming from the bottom of a hill.
Only recently did the government install a footpath across the median strip.
It is drilled into you by teachers very early on that you are to have absolutely nothing to do with this road.
If a teacher on bus stop duty spotted you trying to cross, they would warn you about how dangerous it is.
In a quote that has become a proverb, dating to the early 2010s, a senior teacher in the school is said to have yelled out, in his rather direct manner, to a student running across the road, “You’re a coward!”
In around Year 9 or 10, my Health and PE teacher, who went to the school himself, used a lesson on peer pressure to tell stories of classmates in Year 11 and 12 who got into horrific car accidents by speeding down Canberra Avenue on a dare after getting their P’s.
Horror stories and accosting aside, people do cross the street. People live there, of course, and even students who don’t have many reasons to. The R2 bus runs from Wentworth Avenue, near the train station. The nearest cafes for Year 11 and 12 students going to lunch or on their free period is on the other side of the street.
Sporadically, the school will lobby the government to implement measures to improve the street’s safety: sternly worded letters, petitions to the Legislative Assembly, and public appeals in the press.
These efforts are usually dismissed as, as transport minister Chris Steel put it in response to a petition launched in 2022, a reduced speed zone for the school and its traffic calming infrastructure would be “incompatible with this road’s arterial function”.
Minister Steel also promised an internal review investigating other potential safety measures, such as a signalised crossing, but it would not seem that much has changed.
The need to implement safety measures on Canberra Avenue takes on a whole new relevance as, last Friday, the worst nightmares of Eddies’ students, staff and alumni became a reality.
Police allege a man sped down Canberra Avenue from Queanbeyan before hitting two teenage students crossing outside Eddies.
I disagree with the ACT government that safety measures around the school would be incompatible with the arterial function of Canberra Avenue, not least because many arterial roads go even further than is usually proposed.
Sydney’s notorious Pennant Hills Road, perhaps the archetypal arterial road in Australia, has a school zone and even has traffic cameras that enforce it.
Canberra Avenue, at least outside Eddies, has neither.
Many arterial roads, even in Canberra, have frequent signalised pedestrian crossings. Literally the next road over, Wentworth Avenue, has such crossings!
Canberra Avenue has none (0) in the vicinity of the school: the nearest is over a kilometre — 1 thousand meters — away.
None of these measures would have prevented a person from acting in the manner police have alleged here: stealing a car and speeding it down a wide avenue.
However, they would certainly have decreased the likelihood that these two boys would have been injured by the alleged offender’s actions.
Imagine if, instead of running for their lives across the already extremely dangerous road, the boys were waiting for a green man at a traffic light.
Imagine if these boys could have jumped out of the way of the speeding green Commodore and in front of a car going slow enough that either it could have stopped or, at least, caused much less severe injuries.
These boys were not given these options.
Can we please talk about them?
Update: After this piece was written, the territory roads minister Tara Cheyne told a press conference that she had asked her directorate for “a briefing […on] any safety treatments that we might be able to implement” on Canberra Avenue.
Comments Off on Walking on a Dream: The Disappointment of the Bunda Street Shared Zone
Canberra’s inner north has been my home my whole life; my backyard, Bunda Street.
The street has always been on the frontline of the fight between car-centric road planners, pedestrians, and resilient small businesses. Back in the 70s, Gus Petersilka, the founder of the recently closed Gus’ Cafe, fought with the federal government for the right to have outdoor dining, today a key attraction of the area.
My own memories of Bunda Street include family birthday dinners at long-gone Chinese food establishments like Sammy’s and Hidden Dragon, being stood up at what was to be my first-ever date at Kokomo’s, and many strolls up and down the street, a cup of Via Dolce coffee in hand, after a late weekend brunch.
Last year marked the tenth anniversary of the ACT government’s designation of Bunda Street as a shared zone. Pedestrians were given priority, popular crossing spots were raised to slow cars down, line markings were removed, the bitumen was painted and paved differently from other streets, and the speed limit was reduced to a much safer 20 kilometres per hour.
This comprised the last stage of the ‘City Loop’, a project to create a cycling and walking corridor through the city that avoided busy roads like London Circuit and Cooyong Street. Has this car diet been a success? To anyone who regularly uses the street today, the answer is obviously a resounding no.
Crossing the street as a pedestrian remains unpleasant (and, during peak hours, dangerous) as it was before the renovation. Drivers refuse to yield as they are required to, frequently slamming their brakes just before hitting people — a sin most commonly committed by white cars bearing NSW license plates, in my experience.
The choice to keep a large number of street parking spaces means that using the street for its intended post-renovation purpose — cycling — requires negotiation with cars that randomly stop to take a parking space or pull out without looking or indicating.
Many drivers use it as a rat run from Northbourne Avenue to avoid the stretch of traffic lights on Cooyong Street. This includes many commuters, but whenever there’s a large national event in Canberra, you can bet that an even longer line of cars will inexplicably line up Bunda as a poorly thought-out shortcut.
Bunda Street’s shared zone signage seems more directed at reminding pedestrians of their putative right to cross unimpeded rather than informing drivers of their obligation to slow down to preserve said right. At the intersection with the pedestrianised part of Ainslie Avenue that runs through the Canberra Centre, there’s an unnecessary and confusing set of traffic lights with crossing signals erected before the pedestrianisation that were never removed.
This is not to say that the renovations were entirely pointless. The street is much more pleasant than the dangerous car sewer it replaced. A video of a pro-same-sex marriage march in 2011 shows activists being wedged onto the tight footpaths on either side of the street — a stark contrast from the colourful street-wide protest march against the “bigot bill” a decade later. The shared zone, combined with the Canberra Centre’s recent pedestrianisation of Scotts Crossing, has made Bunda Street even more vibrant and accessible.
The territory government has for decades tried to encourage the take-up of active and public transit, but it has often done so with vague and unclear initiatives like “car-free days”, which scare the car-dependent Canberran public into thinking that Chairman Barr is coming for their beloved vehicles.
They would do better at reducing our dependence on cars by making a real effort to make active and public transit as comfortable as driving. The tram provided a fantastic alternative for inner north and Gungahlin residents, but the sharp reduction in suburban bus frequencies that occurred at the same time as the tram has been entirely unhelpful.
My dream for my backyard, at the risk of sounding like a NIMBY (Not In My BackYard), would be for Bunda Street to be closed to car traffic. Not every street needs cars running down it, much less an eat street atop a large underground car park a block away from Canberra’s largest transit interchange.
There is no argument against freeing Bunda Street from the tyranny of the private motor vehicle.
For all the hassle they cause, the number of parking spaces along the street and the revenue they bring in is miniscule. FOI documents last year revealed that the territory government makes (on average) only about $80,000 a year from paid parking on the street while issuing about $250,000 in parking fines. It is the businesses along the street, not the parking spaces, that attract people to come here.
The idea that businesses need unimpeded car access to the street is also bunk. During the annual Multicultural Festival, where the whole street becomes a pleasant car-free marketplace, deliveries to businesses along the street are certainly impacted, but not meaningfully prevented.
A good compromise would be closing the street between Tocumwal Lane (the laneway near Via Dolce) and Genge Street (near Wilma), which would force away the worst of the through-traffic while leaving cyclists, deliveries and other essential traffic largely unimpeded. Retractable bollards could allow vehicle access during emergencies or public events like parades.
Closing Bunda Street to car traffic would be transformative. The street would join the great Australian malls like Pitt Street, Bourke Street, Queen Street, the Rundle Mall and Murray Street as vibrant, people-first spaces. It would be a much safer route for cyclists and pedestrians to roam the city and inner north — a much nicer backyard for Canberrans to gather in.
Comments Off on ‘THE HOUSE’: ANU’S RESIDENTIAL HALLS AS A MICROCOSM OF PARLIAMENTARY ELITISM
‘Is there much of an upstairs-downstairs feel in Parliament House?’
‘Yeah, we’ve got people upstairs who have probably never been down to the basement… if I wanted people to take note, I’d stop delivering coffee and toilet paper.’
These are the words of Sandy McInerney, Logistics Manager of Parliament House’s underground ‘catacombs’, in conversation with Annabel Crabb in her 2017 docuseries The House. Offhand words in one twenty-second conversation of a three-hour documentary series, which amongst all those exploring the glory and intricacies of Parliament’s ‘upstairs’ rooms, were the ones that lingered in my mind.
Parliament is a living, breathing organism of democracy, of high-level thinking, of the most important people in Australia. But McInerney’s words starkly remind us that no well-pressed suit, nor feet on immaculately steamed red and green carpet, exempt our high-calibre Parliamentarians from their human needs.
It does, however, seemingly exempt them from having to fulfil these needs themselves.
Our most important figures simply float through the halls of Parliament unaffected by such lowly considerations as where to buy their next coffee, or whether the toilet will be clean for them to use. They take blissful baths in the upstairs glory of The House, while a hidden workforce who ‘rarely sees the light of day’ weaves its way through an underground road and tunnel network, ensuring the functionality and comfort of Parliament; it’s just part of the job. The structural hierarchy – the dichotomy between the presentable and the obscured, the up and the down, the fore- and background – is built into the building itself, and subsequently built into parliamentary culture. This culture only works to perpetuate complex notions of ‘upper’ and ‘lower’ that pervade public reality: if the physical manifestation of Australian freedom and justice, representing the views and interests of the Australian people, is so plainly hierarchised, how can we expect society’s culture to reflect or embody anything else?
As I watch the flag fly atop Parliament’s glistening roof from just down the street, I contemplate the people I’m surrounded by, studying at Australia’s National University. I’ve met many a person in my eight months on campus who I could confidently say will sit in Parliament in twenty years. ANU graduates ‘go on to become leaders in government.’ I’m decidedly nestled in a culture that is fostering the minds that will fill the rooms of Parliament soon enough, and who similarly have their day-to-day needs managed in a basement that they will likely never lay eyes on.
My realisation, then, was that these future parliamentarians are, given the immense population of fellow first-year students living on campus, living their day-to-day lives now in much the same dynamic.
When I moved to Canberra, one of the biggest shocks to my system was learning that the kitchens, the bathrooms, the dining areas, and everything short of the individual rooms (unless you’re a Johns resident, if I’m to disseminate frivolous rumours) of my residential hall got cleaned not by those that used it, but by cleaning staff who have nothing to do with the dirtying of these spaces. Clogged sinks filled to the brim with ominous soup turned to sparkling silver overnight. Abandoned pots and pans and knives and forks left strewn across benches after the 7pm rush disappeared eventually. Moulding food was swept away when it got too apparent that its owner was probably not coming back for it.
I couldn’t believe it – I’d gone from being a nineteen-year-old who, despite her freeloading at home, had some semblance of responsibility for cleanliness, to a twenty-year-old who could ultimately leave whatever mess she’d like with very limited real consequences, despite likely dirty looks from others trying to use the stoves.
While having cleaning staff in itself is by no means condemnable, it highlights a crucial element of residential hall existence – that there is a certain, in-built element to this lifestyle that places our education and frankly, in many cases, our exercise of privilege in attending university, above our need to take responsibility for our everyday existence. We are being implicitly told that our intelligence and our ability to pay to live on campus – or, more commonly, to be paid for – places us above the need to engage with the mundane aspects of adult living, particularly for those living in catered residences. In this respect, we are young parliamentarians in more ways than being students of politics and law: living as if we are too important to change a toilet roll.
So many of us wouldn’t know the names of the people who mop our floors for us, and no matter how clean we keep our spaces, we therefore play a part in being the upstairs residents who would take most note of our cleaning staff if they stopped filling the paper towel dispensers and wiping the desks we study on. We can beg the question of whether living in residences, being fed and cleaned for, prepares us for the ‘real world’, but the cold truth is that, for many people, it sure does. Their real world will become the professionalised version: a workplace where they are cushioned by assurance that they need not lift a finger to feel cared for and have not since their first day at college. They will not see the insides of a maintenance cupboard nor the basement of whichever sunlit office they work in and will learn that this is what they worked for: to have the less palatable requirements of comfortable existence offloaded onto someone else.
The wake-up call here is not to drop out of college and start a commune, by any means. This lifestyle gives so many people the opportunities to pursue elements of independent living and study that they otherwise never would have dreamt possible. What lingers in my mind, though, is that this way of living is not as natural or normal as it can begin to feel when immersed in the insularity of it all. Hierarchy does not sit well in houses of any description, yet Australia’s most important House has it coursing through its veins; food for discomforting thought.
The wake-up call is, instead, to thank your cleaners, next time you see them; they are the people who underpin the lifestyle we’re lucky enough to lead, and there will never come a fictitiously constructed hierarchy that changes that.
On the night of the 1st of September, a category 2 cyclone hit Melbourne. I was alone in my parent’s house, lying high and awake in my childhood bed. Checking my notes app the next day, I noticed that I’d written something.
“It’s two forty-five in the morning. I’m alone in my childhood home, and I’m a little scared.”
I used to love storms. I still do, at least on an intellectual level. There’s something empowering about the natural world, and the quiet strength of our buildings withstanding a battering. But it’s been three years since I was in Melbourne for a proper storm, and I’m not used to them anymore. Melbourne isn’t entirely home anymore.
The storm, and my reaction to it, cemented a realisation that’s been dawning on me for some time; I’m getting older. I’m not the same Henry as I was in first year. When I first moved to Canberra, I was a fresh-faced (albeit hirsute) eighteen-year-old. There were endless streams of new people to meet, and I had complete freedom for the first time in my life. As these years went on, Canberra became home. Daley Road became home. I don’t know when Canberra became home, though I know that it is. But now, I’m about to turn twenty-one, and I’m preparing to leave this leafy home. Moving out of Daley Road feels like I’m moving into a new phase. I’m on the precipice of adulthood, and I’d be lying if that wasn’t daunting.
Canberra is a transitory place. Most of us never plan to stay here forever, though many of us will. As students in Canberra, we live a quasi-nomadic life. Our friends are from all over, and there’s endless trips to someone’s hometown that can be made. Since moving to Canberra, I’ve spent more time in Sydney than I ever thought I would. I’ve become familiar with a smorgasbord of small towns —places I didn’t even know existed when I decided to leave Melbourne.
Just like Canberra, being college-age is transitory. For the past three years, my identity has been in constant flux. Every possible experience is handed to you on a platter. I’ve attended talks at embassies immediately after coordinating some of the Engineering School’s brightest minds to make a bong. That’s the beauty of early adulthood. It’s a period of constant discovery. Of constant change, excitement, and experimentation. There’s a reason you don’t see many 40 year olds packing into the forests near Pialligo for a doof. After a while, the chaos becomes disorienting. I’m aware it’s bizarre that I’m writing this sentence but nevertheless, I’m getting old.
Adulthood excites me. A while back, I had a conversation with one of my best friends. Being from Melbourne, we’re both rarities in our Sydneysider friendship group. Driving along Hoddle Street in Melbourne, on our way to a day of unnecessarily expensive sandwiches and thrifting in Fitzroy, he asked me whether I’d rather get older or get younger and redo my childhood. I generally avoid existential crises before lunchtime, but this dilemma gripped me.
I didn’t have a good answer at the time, but I can now confidently say that adulthood excites me more than youth. Stability is more thrilling to me than chaos. I think that makes me boring and I think that’s what scares me the most. I was asked once if I’d prefer to be happy or interesting. At the time I said interesting. But I can’t stand by that answer anymore. I would rather be happy and simple.
The tragedy of youth is that it ends. We can only be interesting for so long, at some point, normalcy comes knocking. What is daunting to me now is that I know I’ll open the door. As I attend my last college events, as I go to house inspections and fill out rental applications, as I apply for APS and paralegal jobs, as I leave hospo behind, I am walking down the corridor. I don’t know if I’m ready to open the door, but that doesn’t matter. I’ll have to turn the knob anyway.
This article will use the acronym of ILM for simplicity’s sake, despite the generalisation and homogenisation that the term represents.
A solution often posed to the challenges of climate change, environmental damage, and habitat loss unleashed by colonialism, is to find ways to integrate Indigenous land management (ILM) into the Western ecological management systems currently used in Australia. In support of this promising solution, ten years ago the Australian Landcare Council commissioned a review of the extent, scope and diversity of ILM practices across Australia, seeking to assess success factors and barriers to its use.
Although this review represented a positive step toward changing how we care for land in Australia, very little has changed on the ground. Australia’s natural landscape continues to suffer from extractive and damaging practices. The review identified that one barrier to integrating ILM into current practices was that “power imbalances lead to western systems playing the dominant role in education and land management practices” and suggests this represents a threat to traditional knowledge and languages and ILM.
While the identification of this barrier gets close to the issue, the reasons Australia’s attempts at ILM integration continually fail are more complex. The underlying barrier is the uneven dynamic of power between Western and Indigenous epistemology and ontology. Epistemology and ontology sound like scary words, but epistemology is really just theories of knowledge, and ontology is the philosophical study of existence, being, and reality. By thinking about ILM and western environmental management through the lenses of epistemology and ontology, we can begin to see where tensions emerge in integration.
Academics have argued natural resource management in Australia relies on ‘whitefella’ separation of cultural, ecological, and social knowledge. Specifically, Western ecological knowledge treats elements of the environment separately, and compartmentalises their management, focusing on quantitative measures, like equilibrium, and notions of ‘maximum sustainable yield’. Moreover, the environment is treated as a commodified resource that must be managed, not a living entity in relationship with people.
We can trace the epistemological foundations of western resource management back to the Age of Enlightenment during the 17th and 18th centuries, and the replacement of religion with science as the primary source of knowledge and normative judgement. From this shift, a tendency emerged in Western philosophy towards positivism. Positivism is a philosophical system that focuses on what can be scientifically verified, or logically proven, and rejects metaphysics and theism.
The dominant scientific paradigm of today finds its roots in this tradition. In this world view, the binaries between mind and body, nature and culture are reified, and many aspects of human life are reduced to biological imperatives. Western philosophy, with its emphasis on reason and science, rejects the metaphysical, and instead seeks to understand reality in ‘objective’ terms. This ‘enlightened’ preference for secular thinking has led to a treatment of any ‘non-objective’ religious or spiritual traditions as beyond the realm of the objective sciences.
In this system, knowledge exists separately from and outside social and historical definitions and processes, and moreover, this separation is the basis for its authority. Western philosophy, in its quest for ‘objective’ knowledge, has sought to exclude any cultural, ontological, or epistemological elements, essentially erasing any link between culture and place, which is the foundation of Indigenous knowledge.
Indigenous knowledge processes are deeply bound to local place, as knowledge is formed through the unique characteristics of ecologies, in which “country tells you what is going on, it calls for action and invites engagement”. In this model, the health of the land is linked to the health of the people. Relationships to land form the basis for all interactions, and a symbiotic relationship exists in which the knowledge that sustains ecological practices, the social roles between people and the living environment, and the environment itself, all produce each other. This system of knowledge stands in stark contrast to the Western tradition, in which culture and nature, human and non-human are distinctly separate categories.
Due to the philosophical origin of Western ecological theory, a tendency has emerged to understand and use Indigenous knowledge in a very specific way. Specifically, it is generally only engaged with or sought out or regarding knowledge that is already considered to be relevant to Western notions of environment, and already within the purview of ‘science’ and ‘reason’. An example of this is the seeking out of Indigenous knowledge around back burning for fire control, in order to improve the current practices and systems. Another tendency that emerges is to view ILM as a timeless, static repository of knowledge to be mined. This perspective emerged during the environmental movements of the 1960s, in which indigenous people began to be understood and portrayed ‘noble environmentalists’ living in harmony with the land.
The consequence of these tensions is that the process of integrating ILM becomes a process in which Indigenous knowledge is seen as ‘content’ to be extracted and used for management purposes, rather than a process itself, a set of practices and symbiotic interaction and relationships between people, other living beings and things. Western ecological management often seeks to extract ILM from its local context which produces it, taking only what is perceived to be of value – that with demonstrable tangible outcomes. This extraction of ILM is completely contradictory to Indigenous culture, in which knowledge is produced in relationship to local places, and through the relationships between the people living on the land.
This tendency for ‘cherry picking’ has been widely discussed in environmental theory as a major obstacle in integrating these systems of knowledge. However, it is not enough to simply recognize that ILM is not static but adaptive, constantly being renewed in local engagement with people and country, and not able to be extracted as a tool for ecological management.
Instead, we must also recognize the epistemic incompatibility between the two systems of thought, because the underlying objectivity of the Western system is derived from its separation between science and culture, people and things, from its rejection of the spiritual and metaphysical.
Indeed, it seems an unlikely possibility that the dominant Western system would be able to understand and view indigenous knowledge as valid for what it is; a place based, ethic of living, that incorporates non-human living things. To recognize this and to recognize the value ILM has, would be to undermine Western philosophy’s authority as ‘objective’.
Frameworks for integration have suggested a re-conceptualisation of the relationship between these two systems. Suggestions include holding meetings about environmental care on country, set through Indigenous frameworks of negotiation, based on Indigenous customs. Other suggestions include the pedagogical tool ‘perspective taking’, where participants are required to engage in the identity and narratives of others, and situate them according to themselves, and examine any connectedness between the two has been posed. These solutions, however, unfortunately, fall short of a suitable framework for integration, as they fail to account for the uneven dynamics of power between the Western and Indigenous systems of knowledge. They reflect a superficial engagement with the ontological divide, and suggest an even playing field in which each perspective is given the same epistemic authority.
Other solutions posed, emphasise that engagement with indigenous knowledge must be ‘equitable’, and incorporate “genuine exchange”, “two-way learning” and “moral reciprocity”’. However, moral reciprocity is an intersubjective exchange, in which each party recognizes the worth of the other. For that reason, I am hesitant to accept that a framework of integration between these two systems of knowledge could involve moral reciprocity, when the epistemic authority of one system relies on the abject rejection of fundamental elements of another.
Indigenous scholars have echoed similar concerns, arguing that when Indigenous knowledge becomes a commodity, it can be appropriated and used by the dominant structures of power to support the existing status quo, and can be appropriated, marginalized, and even used against Indigenous communities.
In this way, we can see we should be sceptical of any attempts to integrate ILM into Western ecological management systems, as it could be seen as is akin to neo-colonial assimilation, in which the context and true meaning of the knowledge is erased, thus perpetuating the constant, gradual dispossession of Indigenous dispossession on country.
A solution often posed to the challenges of climate change, environmental damage, and habitat loss unleashed by colonialism, is to find ways to integrate Indigenous land management (ILM) into the Western ecological management systems currently used in Australia.
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 Interview with Boo Seeka – Woroni Artist Series
Boo Seeka is an Australian electropop artist currently touring Australia, with a show in Canberra on the 2nd of March. He has featured on the Triple J Hottest 100, played Coachella, and recently released his sophomore album, Between the Head and the Heart. We sat down with Boo Seeka to discuss his creative process, his musical influences, and the highlights of his career.
Let’s start with our first question, you’ve obviously recently released Between the Head and the Heart. We just want to know what’s the song that you’re most proud of on the album?
There’s a few, but I guess the most iconic one that kind of set up the whole record for me was I Like It Like, purely because I actually had a whole record written prior to the one that I wrote for Between the Head and the Heart and I guess where I was at in my life at that particular time and some stuff kind of happened, pretty spontaneously, that I wasn’t expecting that. Everything that I’d written for the record, it wasn’t speaking to me personally at that time. I scrapped it, and I had this moment where I just was standing in front of a mirror, and it was almost like I had this sensation of myself talking back to me through this mirror. I just started writing down like this conversation that I was having with myself, which turned into I Like It Like, so I guess for me, I got to give that song a highlight for the record, considering everything kind of grew from there.
That’s really interesting. You’ve spoken on having to sort of redo the whole record, essentially having to make a brand new record. What was the hardest song on the record to make?
The hardest song was Happen. I’d written the song and we had a demo, and we liked the demo of it, but it still wasn’t speaking to us. And then, literally, I think probably every other song that was on [Between the Head and the Heart] really didn’t take any longer than a day to record it, but Happen probably took nearly three weeks in itself to find the way that I wanted that song to come out.
For me, it was also another stepping stone of not worrying too much. You know, obviously I want things to be cohesive, but not worrying too much about it all sounding the same. I think for me it’s making the sound around the song that I want to write, to have the justice that it needs. So for me, that’s going into the next record that I’m writing now. It doesn’t necessarily have to be one particular sound across the whole record. You know, I think there’s other ways to artistically make it cohesive as a record but serve each song differently in a way so that it has the justice musically for the lyrical content that I’m writing.
So obviously you’ve written two records and you’re currently writing your third. What’s your main source of inspiration? Does it differ between each album?
Yeah, if you speak to most artists, we’re all sponges. I don’t think there’ll be that many artists out there that don’t take in anything that doesn’t inspire them within a day. But I guess the most key one for me is just my brain will suck in a lot of things going on in my world, and yet I find it very hard to just talk to people in a normal conversation about what I’m feeling. But I find it very easy to get it out through a song. So for me, the inspiration is getting out all those thoughts, whether they’re negative or positive in my head through music.
It’s really interesting to hear your opinions on people’s inspiration for music and everything, and how you don’t sort of have one thing but rather everything that you do in your day to day life. So to talk about other musicians, just briefly, what is your dream music collaboration? Like if you could collaborate with anyone in the world, alive or dead, who would it be?
Oh, that’s a hard one. It’s a very hard one actually. I’m going to be a bit sneaky here and pick two. Alive? I’d say Billie Eilish. I just think she’s absolutely incredible in everything that she does. And you know, she’s just doing her, and I think that’s a very inspiring thing.
Someone that’s passed? I’d say George Harrison. What an iconic songwriter. I came from a singer-songwriter background before I started writing electronic music and I still do to this day. Most songs written by me are on an acoustic guitar. At one point in my career, I reckon I’ll do an acoustic tour, with all the songs basically stripped down–bare minimum, to an acoustic guitar– because I really do think that not all songs, but a majority of great songs, can all be stripped down to literally just a piano and a guitar and a vocal. To me, George Harrison was just so iconic in his writing. That would be pretty, pretty awesome.
Our Art Editor is sitting just outside the frame and nodding. Those were good choices for musicians.
Aw, sweet. Thank you.
You’re on tour around Australia now. But I want to know; what’s your most memorable live performance so far?
Well, there’s been so many. There’ll be a few for different reasons. I was actually in a band prior to Boo Seeka and I felt like I cut my teeth with those guys, and learnt everything that set me up to be able to do Boo Seeka the way that I’m doing it. I owe a lot of credit to those guys, but they got to an age where they didn’t want to do it anymore and it was, honestly, the most devastating time of my life, getting told that they didn’t want to do it anymore. To me, I had nothing else to do but play music.
When Boo Seeka kicked off, and I guess having that first iconic moment of completely selling out your first-ever show. You know, you’ve worked so long to get to a point, and then you finally fill the room. I think that would be one iconic moment for me in my career.
Playing Coachella last year was obviously a massive one. Definitely a bucket list thing I never anticipated in doing. Playing Red Rocks in Denver. Growing up as a kid, watching DVDs of Red Rocks with all the bands and artists that I love with my parents, and then actually standing on that stage and playing to a packed house was a moment I’ll never forget.
And I’m just so thankful for all the stepping stones that I have been able to do, from the festival scene within Australia and playing all those iconic festivals. Playing regional tours and capital cities and packed rooms, and having people have that experience of singing back to me songs that I’ve written for myself but connecting in their own ways with me every night. I’ll never forget that and I’ll never get sick of it.
That’s amazing. I follow these big music festivals and it’s really amazing to see people’s progression from small Australian shows and festivals to these massive American festivals like Coachella and Red Rocks. It’s really awesome to see and really interesting to hear it from someone who’s done it.
If you’re able to, can you tell me about your creative process? I know we talked about where you find your inspiration, but once you’ve got the inspiration, how do you go about making a song or a record?
There’s definitely a lot of different ways, I’m not really the guy to just go “right, today I’m going to write a song”. It works for a lot of people. One of my best friends ever, he’s basically my brother, another very incredible and inspiring person, inspires me every day in writing. But he writes in such a different way, he wakes up at like three-thirty or four in the morning, every morning, and just writes. His kind of thing is writing at those very early hours of the day when his brain is fresh, which is a very inspiring thing. But in saying that, I’ve tried that twice and it’s not for me. I like my sleep.
I think for me, again it’s just sucking in inspiration, walking down the street, to finally putting the jigsaw puzzle together in my head, or that there’s a certain line that will set up the whole rest of a song of what I want to say. That might be me just literally humming out a line for a couple of hours just by myself. I’ve always got a guitar laying around the house and picking it up and strumming a couple of chords, and it really is to me like putting a puzzle together. You find one piece and you find the next piece and you put it together. Sometimes those pieces come really quickly and you put the whole thing together in literally 15 minutes. Sometimes you have to put down a couple of pieces and walk away and come back and look at it again and connect more things. I wouldn’t say there’s one specific way that I write music, but in a whole, that would be how I go about it.
You’ve been making music since 2015, so about eight years. Tell me how your creative process differs from how it was 8, 10 years ago.
The first three songs that I wrote were Kingdom Leader, Deception Bay, and Fool. They were literally tracked, recorded, mixed, and mastered in three days. Three songs in three days. That was coming out of this big turnaround in my life with my previous band. It was writing about taking on this new journey and being the ruler of my own kingdom moving forward. Then meeting Sam [Croft], and everything that he brought to the band. We were in sixth gear straight away, we literally put out a song and then, two weeks later, we left on tour. After that tour, we had the whole year booked out. So for us, writing became part of being on the road. When our manager at the time was like, “right guys, it’s time to do a full length record”, most bands will pull off the road and book time into a studio and won’t tour.
For Sam and I, we just loved being on the road and finding that we’re getting more inspiration being on the road. So for us, we basically set up a little recording kind of vibe that we could take literally around the world. We were recording in hotels and in RVs and in buses and at airports. Some of the sounds that no one will ever pick up, I think there’s only been about two or three that have actually picked up some certain things. There are sounds in that first full length record that were literally Sam going around and recording different street sounds and building them into beats. I think that was a big thing that Sam brought to the project at that time that gave that first full length record a bit of a worldly feel.
Whereas now? Writing a record was very different compared to [Never Too Soon] for Between the Head and the Heart, because we couldn’t tour. I was almost struggling to find what I wanted to write about for the next record because for me, again, I pick up inspiration from being outside. Like I hate a regimented kind of routine every day. I hate doing the same thing twice. I like to do everything different, every day, as much as I possibly can. [Lockdown] was really hard for me. I went digging in deeper, inside my soul and into my head to write Between the Head and the Heart. Very different to the first record.
I guess the world has changed a lot in the eight years since you started making music as Boo Seeka. It’s really interesting how your creative process has changed with the world. You were nominated for a Triple J Unearthed Award and you were also on the Triple J Hottest 100. What do you think the value of platforms like Triple J is for emerging artists in Australia? What was the value of that for you and what do you think it is for other people?
It’s massive, I genuinely think Triple J is one of the greatest platforms for any up and coming band ever. We got Unearthed through Triple J, but still to this day, I’m going on and finding new music. I go back on that platform and just go searching for bands all around Australia. Whoever came up with that concept is a genius because you find bands that aren’t packing out rooms all around Australia, not selling out thousands of tickets but you go and find them and you go “holy crap, like, I love this music” and you hope that you see those bands go out and tour. But there’s bands that I follow on there that I’ve never seen play a show but I love listening to their music. You know, I think it’s just a great platform to go and find new music and things that you’re into and see where music is going. It’s an incredible platform.
A final question. Do you have any advice for people looking to get into music here in Australia, like getting into the music scene?
I guess it’s a little bit cliche – it’s very cliche. I just genuinely think it’s where every musician needs to start; just do it because you love it. Like genuinely just do it, doesn’t matter whether you’re in your bedroom or not. There’s some artists who don’t even want to tour, they don’t want to play in front of crowds, and they do it because they genuinely love playing music and writing songs. But if you’re getting into this game to be famous and play in front of a packed room, then you’re doing it for all the wrong reasons.
Don’t get down on playing to one or two people. You should be going into any gig, whether it’s one person or 10,000 people, playing 100% exactly the same as what you would do in a big crowd. I’ve always had that philosophy since I played in my old band. We literally played to two people that were sitting in front of us and the bar staff, and those two people sitting in front of us owned a very well known guitar company that I’m still endorsed by and set us up for life with guitars. It showed me that you just never know who’s sitting in the room. So always get out there and do your best.
That’s great advice. Thank you so much for the opportunity to interview you.
Boo Seeka will be playing in Kambri at ANU on March 2nd with support from Apricot Ink as part of his Regional Tour around Australia.
Comments Off on Greenwashing Our Drowning Futures: A Call to Action from the South to the North
We are not facing a climate crisis that is imminent in the distant future. But we are in the middle of a climate catastrophe as we speak. While here in Australia, much as in the rest of the Global North, we convene in siloed conferences and policy forums; discuss climate resilience and mitigation in hallowed halls and ivory towers; deliberate on what the future may hold in a still distant 2050 – a future with a projected global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius – for millions of people across the world, 2050 is already upon them.
One-third of Pakistan has been submerged in the recent catastrophic floods. Between June to August this year, Pakistan’s southernmost provinces faced a 400 percent increase in their average monsoon rainfall. In addition to this, Pakistan is home to 7200 glaciers, the largest number in the world outside of the polar regions. Rising temperatures due to global warming are accelerating the Himalayan glacial melt in Pakistan at a much faster rate than previously anticipated by scientists.
Just in the recent catastrophe alone, 33 million lives were affected – more than the total population of Australia. This includes 16 million children, and 650,000 pregnant women without access to proper health services, with much of the infrastructure devastated. Four million acres of farmland has been destroyed, causing an acute crisis of food insecurity, and large swathes of the country are still underwater. While it has been estimated that the waters will take six more months to recede, the flood-ravaged lands are becoming breeding grounds for water-borne diseases – cholera, malaria, dengue – while experts warn the coming of a “second wave of death and destruction.”
Pakistan merits our attention for the sheer injustice of its people facing the worst brunt of climate catastrophe, while the country’s global share of carbon emissions is only less than 1 percent. An injustice that is compounded by a severe debt burden of $130 billion and crippling International Monetary Fund (IMF) conditionalities, including taxes on oil and electricity, at a time of an unprecedented disaster. Or the entrenched effects of colonial and imperial entanglements that relegate the country to a ‘no man’s land’ – whose worth is dictated merely by imperial interests and ‘strategic’ relevance to the Global North; and whose calls for immediate debt relief, as demanded by the Pakistani activist community, are drowned out by racialised tropes of ‘violence’ and ‘danger’. But Pakistan is also a glimpse into our collective future – a symbolic front for our advocacy as a country that is already ‘ground zero’ for the climate catastrophe and exhibiting the impact of the dreaded mark of 1.5 degree Celsius.
In this context, we are fast approaching the 27th Annual UN Climate Change Conference of Parties, or COP27. Previous conferences settled upon emissions reduction agreements as outlined in the Kyoto protocols or the Paris Agreement. Not only have these agreements been inadequate but they have also allowed governments to perpetuate climate vandalism through an ostensible facade of seeking climate solutions. Greta Thunberg called last year’s COP26 conference in Glasgow more of the same “blah blah blah”. She called for protests around the conference to reject the same old greenwashing, saying that “our hopes and ambitions drown in their empty promises.” The nature of the current climate catastrophes, if anything, expose the hollowness of such initiatives. Even if governments fully adhered to their emissions reductions as agreed upon in the Paris Agreement, the world would still reach apocalyptic levels of climate catastrophe everywhere in the coming decades. A worsening of the disastrous effects is already being felt.
The upcoming conference is set to be held in Egypt this year, even as Egyptian climate activists are protesting this charade of greenwashing and demanding more. The Sisi dictatorship has enforced draconian laws to limit access to information, including their country’s net carbon emissions and is continuing to warehouse hundreds of political prisoners in state prison cells. Recently, Alaa Abd El-Fattah, a high-profile democracy activist on a hunger strike, wrote a letter “about global warming because of the news from Pakistan” and raised concerns about the impending climate catastrophe that will reach us all. Highlighting the 33 million lives affected by the floods in Pakistan, he questioned the (in)adequacy of state responses as global warming continues. This letter, too, has been suppressed by the Egyptian authorities. Other democracy activists in Egypt have also called on climate activists around the world to not allow the Egyptian government to greenwash the dictatorship through the upcoming COP conference.
In Australia, we have a particular responsibility to answer these calls of solidarity from Egypt and Pakistan. Australia is one of the largest contributors to global fossil fuel emissions per capita, particularly from coal export emissions. These emissions are conveniently not counted in the Australian Labor Party’s latest climate bill. Such creative elisions and the absence of any enforceable targets have allowed the Labor party to plan a significant escalation of fossil fuel emission exports, by greenlighting the opening up of 106 new coal and gas projects whilst posturing to address the issue of emission reductions.
There is no lack of academic seminars on the impending climate crisis at the ANU. But beyond these siloed academic engagements, it is pertinent to ask where the university – as an institution – stands on climate change. It is imperative to move from knowledge production to action. The ANU itself has been the subject of a nearly decade-long divestment campaign. Students have overwhelmingly called for full divestment from fossil fuels in two referendums run by the student union ANUSA, first in 2014 and then again last year. The most recent data available to students indicates that our university still has large-scale investments in fossil fuel companies. There is also a shroud of opacity on the specificities of their investments. Without a clear breakdown of companies that ANU invests in, such as what they provided in 2016, we can’t be sure if ANU still invests in companies like Woodside Petroleum or big banks that finance coal projects as they did in that year. What we do know is that ANU’s infrastructure portfolio, which includes millions of dollars invested in the Kwinana gas-fired power station, actually increased its total carbon emissions by almost 23 percent last year. There are no enforceable targets in ANU’s investment portfolio as part of its ‘Below Zero’ campaign and its reports rely heavily on the discredited ESG exposure scores to demonstrate how environmentally sustainable they are.
That is why we have organised a speak-out for climate justice this Friday, the 28th of November to maintain the pressure. We cannot allow for the green-washing and climate vandalism carried out in our name. Or turn the demands for climate justice and debt relief from the Global South into “feel good” opportunities for the Global North to give paltry sums in “charity.” Despite the platitudes offered by elite institutions and state actors (be it ANU’s Socially Responsible Investment reporting, the Australian Labor Party, or those convening COP27) to set out tentative and non-enforceable targets, we are witnessing an unchecked expansion of fossil fuel extraction. Meanwhile millions of lives are already in the throes of disaster, their homes washed away, their farmlands and infrastructure devastated, with no return to normalcy in sight. This is only just the beginning. It is no longer tenable to discuss the climate crisis in terms of a projected future – when this future is already upon us.
Heba is a Pakistani student at ANU and Nick is a member of Socialist Alternative.
This article was written on the stolen land of the Ngunawal, Ngunnawal and Ngambri people. We pay our respect to Elders past, present and emerging and acknowledge that sovereignty has not been ceded. There is no climate justice without Indigenous justice.
At midday, on the 2nd of July, Garema Place was transformed into an amphitheatre.
A crowd of people had overflowed the square and arranged themselves to stand at attention to the amplified voice of protest – a marquee fitted with a PA system. The protesting assembly declared their intentions in the form of a forest of picket signs, disgusted by the overturn of Roe v. Wade. For the past fifty years the US Supreme Court’s landmark case has protected an individual’s right to choose.
The messages were varied in tone, but united in meaning; the cuttingly blunt and the mockingly witty.
“Abortion = Healthcare!” “Girls just want to have fundamental human rights!”
Approaching this scene, I was, for the first time, hit with the scale of the gathering. I wondered aloud who the intended audience of the demonstration was.
Surely, we weren’t seeking the attention of the offending American judiciary? Nor was our national government likely to be moved. Even supposing we did sway the heart of some MP, or an ACT Minister, what exactly did we expect them to do about the erosion of bodily autonomy in a country half-way around the world?
One of my companions knocked me out of my cynicism. She pointed out a pair of young girls, not older than five or six, accompanying their mother at the rally. One held a twig with a sheet of A4 paper taped to the end – a picket sign in miniature.
“There’s your audience.”
…
Packed into the square – steps and tables standing in for bleachers – we listened to a series of speeches. Topics ranged from the specific and horrific consequences of anti-abortion legislation, to the details of the Roe v. Wade decision, and strong calls for more radical and progressive reform in our own government. The style of the speakers also varied. The event saw touching personal storytelling, cautious optimism from veteran activists and firebrand oratory from the socialist contingent; all serving to unite and ignite the crowd with a potent mixture of outrage and hope.
At the close of the speeches, from somewhere within the audience, a drum started beating. We followed it, and our small armada of signs marched through Civic Square, the Legislative Assembly and the shopping centre. Loosely escorted by police, alternatively stoic and professional or enthusiastically supportive, we marched on the road. The slight sense of trespass and the disrupted traffic only added to our sense of importance and unity.
As the task of calling “What do we want?” and “When do we want it?” passed through the crowd like a baton, the accompanying “Abortion Rights!” and “Now!” echoed off the surrounding buildings; my mind turned again to who this was all for.
A week later, I don’t remember much of the speeches, nor do I remember those who gave them. What I do remember is their oratory skills and genuine passion for the cause. What I remember is the crowd. I remember when the speakers brought up some shameful statistics. I remember being appalled. And those around me shared my sentiment. When a story of strength or some progressive proposal was forwarded, I remember cheering – along with everybody else. I remember the beating of the drum, a bass note for our cries of support and denouncement.
In this way, by the fluctuations of hope and outrage, the consistency of our agreement, and the sense of group disobedience the assembly was turned from a collection of strangers to a unit with purpose. Group mentality, good versus evil, us and them; they’re old tricks, but undeniably effective.
…
A protest is a tool – like a crowbar or a chisel. It’s an instrument that works to effect change on a social system and its effectiveness, like any tool, depends both on the force generated by it, and the precision with which it is wielded. The elements that give a protest its force, how it generates and focuses the energy of its participants, are well studied, widely practiced, tried-and-true. But the matter of when and where to apply that energy, and who best to bring that force, these are open questions.
This is a solidarity march. In solidarity with a series of protests across the country – part of a larger demonstration as a warning to our own government. But this march is also for us, the marchers; in solidarity with one another. By gathering, marching, listening to speeches and making signs we reaffirm each other’s belief that reproductive rights are human rights, and that those rights are worth defending. We are all, in some way, those young girls; and we teach one another what their mother is teaching them – when our rights, our freedoms, and the principles we believe in come under attack, this is what we do.
Think your name would look good in print? Woroni is always open for submissions. Email write@woroni.com.au with a pitch or draft. You can find more info on submitting here.
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