I could have cats

Hot property

This is an article I wrote for the first edition of Farrago in 2009. I found it when I was digging for a writing sample to attach to a job application, and thought I’d republish. I’m busy over the next week, too, so this is my way of writing without actually having to write.

In the interests of disclosure, I’m including a footnote that was in my submission but not in the published article. It was clipped in the editing process, but I think it’s okay.

In the thick of second semester last year and well into the quiet campus summer, a group of loosely affiliated students calling themselves the Student Housing Action Collective (SHAC) illegally occupied four University-owned terrace houses in Faraday Street that had sat vacant since 2005. The collective claimed to be addressing the need for affordable student housing and alleviating the pressure on those who struggle to attain it.

The 20 students converted the houses into a ‘co-op’: the proposal being that students in need could come to SHAC and potentially secure accommodation by sharing in the everyday decision-making and maintenance of the property. SHAC members squatted in the buildings for months, publicly stating that its occupants were “homeless” and had “nowhere else to go”. SHAC declined requests made by the University to vacate the properties; with SHAC member James Field arguing that the University has a “moral responsibility to assist homeless students”.

The co-operative housing model that SHAC proposes is an interesting one, and it’s a shame that the submissions the collective made to the University Council—submitted in August and October of 2008—were not more widely publicised. It’s plain that much effort was put into their compilation. Co-operative housing is not suited to all tastes, but at a time when rental vacancies are scarce, it is one of a myriad of options to potentially decrease reliance on a tenuous private market.

SHAC insisted that the Faraday Street terraces were ideal for the implementation of their co-operative. The University condemned SHAC’s actions and demanded that the students evacuate university property. In December, a process of negotiation began, and the University made a pilot offer to the collective.

The pilot proposed that the University be the guarantor, and pay the bond on several properties in the private rental market for one year, for 20 students. Students would be required to pay $90 a week in rent, pay utilities and bills and maintain the properties. In a letter to SHAC dated December 3rd, 2008, Vice-Principal of Property and Campus Services, Chris White, states that these properties will be “in suitable proximity to the University” and SHAC “then manages the properties in accordance with their proposed guidelines [of co-operative housing]”.

The rent for such properties would be partly subsidized by the University, as $90 a week in rent for properties of that capacity and location would be inadequate. Manager of Housing Services Adrian Burrage states that the University would have subsidised the project to the tune of approximately $40,000. An offer of interim emergency accommodation was also made to any students had nowhere to live once the SHAC house was cleared.

All offers were provisional on SHAC members evacuating the Faraday Street properties on dates set by the University.

Letters bounced back and forth between SHAC and the University in early December, with SHAC lobbying for alterations to the offer¹. SHAC member James Field says that the University’s offer was “an ultimatum” and another member, Liz Patterson, says the University displayed “a continual unwillingness to give us [SHAC] information” and “called off negotiations”. SHAC eventually rejected the offer of a pilot co-op.

SHAC’s reasons for refusing the offer were varied: the University gave no guarantee that the project would persist beyond 2009; the University would not commit to increasing the number of students housed by the program over the next three years; and that the pilot should not use properties on the private rental market.

SHAC stated that the funds for the SHAC pilot would be diverted from existing programs that run through Housing Services (Housing Grants). In a letter from the University to SHAC dated 9 December, 2008, it is stated that “the University will subsidise the rent of property acquired by using the existing Housing Grant fund and other resources as required”. The details on this remain sketchy. An email response from Adrian Burrage on the 23rd of January this year reads that “the Office of the Provost had agreed to provide new budget for covering the cost of the interim (temporary) accommodation and the additional costs of subsidizing the rent of properties acquired for the pilot program”. Burrage goes on to state that taking the money from the existing Housing Grant “was never entertained”.

SHAC was correct—and Burrage admits—that the University’s proposal was not a viable long-term option. Such a model could not provide for all students experiencing housing stress, and could conceivably siphon funds from programs that aid a greater number of students.

James Field says that “the University’s offer…kept the social model of a co operative…but without the underlying commitment to setting up an actual co-operative in which the residents of the co-operative are involved in the decision-making for the properties”. Several SHAC members agreed that the University would be well-advised to proceed with the offered proposal without the involvement of SHAC, which suggests that the offer was not “bogus” as SHAC wrote on their blog. Although there were no guarantees for the project’s existence beyond 2009, all pilot projects that require funding require testing (hence a pilot program), thus the latent reasoning behind SHAC’s refusal seemed to be that the offer didn’t accord with the exact co-op model that SHAC sought.

Undoubtedly, the University’s offer stemmed from the desire to remove students from the properties: SHAC remained in the buildings long past the point of request for eviction. The City of Melbourne was demanding the properties be emptied and the University confirmed plans for their development. These plans, as cited by Acting Vice-Chancellor and Provost, Peter McPhee, may now proceed with greater haste.

The University would not set a precedent by appearing to cave into a group of students who had illegally occupied university property. Faults in the pilot proposal aside, SHAC’s refusal has left its members—perhaps both literally and figuratively—out in the cold.

Statistics detailing the state of the inner-city private rental market were quoted throughout SHAC’s campaign, and while they are concerning statistics, it was not faithfully examined whether the University should be the first port of call to mitigate this crisis.

If the controversy surrounding SHAC can be whittled down to a central issue, it is this: is it the responsibility of a university to provide housing for its students?

In a blurb from the Facebook group, I ? the Student Housing Action Collective (SHAC) [administered by SHAC members] it is stated that “…we need to address the supply side of the housing problem. The best thing the university could do in this respect would be to invest in affordable housing for students.”

Universities have an interest in student welfare, and the inclusion of counselling and housing services alongside the numerous curricula attests to that role—but universities are educational and research institutions, not social welfare institutions.

Contrary to SHAC’s claims, universities aren’t surfing a tide of cash and it’s naïve to imply that there are boundless coffers with which to subsidise housing for the student body. It’s reasonable to expect certain level of student welfare from a university—to inject time and resources into Housing Services and Financial Aid; to invest in emergency accommodation for students whose housing situation unavoidably collapses; and perhaps for the University wield its influence to lobby government in addressing broader student welfare issues.

These moves would not attack the supply-side issue of housing, but are a more financially viable way to assist larger numbers of students without unsustainable expenditure. For, surely, if tens of thousands of dollars are spent on students, it should not be on small-scale projects that can only assist a handful of students at any one time.

SHAC’s continued emphasis on creating co-op headquarters in the terrace houses belied the real issues—it was never about veggie patches. SHAC were squatters on the cusp of eviction. Direct political action has its place, but considering that SHAC knew their days were numbered, what did the collective have to gain from remaining in the terrace houses?

The disuse of the Faraday Street buildings is unfortunate, but those buildings are owned by the University and the University has the legal right to govern that property howsoever they choose. If a person has a spare couch sitting in their garage that hasn’t been sat on for several months, it’s a waste, but the couch is no less theirs for lack of use.

SHAC’s perceived sense of entitlement to inhabit properties that weren’t legally theirs didn’t aid their campaign, despite claims that they spoke on behalf of the student cohort. For instance, an anonymous comment on SHAC’s blog reads, ‘In an environment in which teaching and learning outcomes (the very role of a University) are under threat due to lack of funds, it is rather perplexing to see a group of young people who insist that the University owes them cheap, inner city housing.’

SHAC received their share of support, but there were many students who were angered by the collective’s incessant demands and the public face they presented from the terrace balconies. One can’t help but wonder how many hours of their week the SHAC members spent on their campaign that weren’t spent working or looking for available housing; or, indeed, how many of those students were in so desolate a condition as to warrant being called ‘homeless’. Adrian Burrage says that ‘…a strategic mistake…was that in some media they [SHAC] are seen to be saying that they were all being forced out on the street and they were all homeless…when I think most people recognise that wouldn’t be true for all of those students’.

SHAC accomplished some good work. They, at times, worked with the University to present their co-operative model and their early media coverage briefly illuminated the multifaceted strains on students to balance the scales on increasingly tighter budgets. Ultimately, though, the collective became too centred on “embarrassing the University”, as SHAC member Liz Patterson phrased it.

The media coverage on SHAC, particularly in the latter stages of their occupation, was focused on the legal skirmish between the collective and the University. Peter McPhee states that “one of the reasons why…SHAC blew it was that by the end of their occupation, the emphasis in the media was actually upon them as squatters…the issue became what they claimed to be their right to continue to occupy university buildings”.

Contrary to an assertion made on Facebook by SHAC member Max Kaiser, that SHAC were “media darlings”, their extended retreat in the Faraday Street properties diluted SHAC’s credibility. On the morning of the eviction, a section in the daily notes for ABC News crews read “squatters deadline…May get ugly. Worth having a camera there in case they’re dragged out kicking and screaming.”

For all of their policy work on the co-operative housing model, the efficacy of SHAC’s campaign should be measured by its outcomes, and they’ve left themselves in an unfortunate position. Being publicly and forcefully evicted is unlikely to aid SHAC’s push for co-operative housing a year from now. By making the Faraday Street properties the locus of their campaign, SHAC diverted university resources into the petty legalities of evicting 20 students, rather than the housing crisis at large.

SHAC members countered that SHAC will persist beyond their eviction, continue to raise awareness of the student housing crisis and fight for co-operative living. Though the perennial question mark hovers: if SHAC is a resource for those who suffer under housing stress, whose front door do they knock on?

¹ The University did not wish to provide me with requested copies of the original pilot proposal, but details of the pilot and the correspondence between SHAC and the University can be found on SHAC’s blog: http://shacmelbourne.blogspot.com/2008/12/shac-university-correspondence.html

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Song titles for a break-up album

You Kissed Her (Saw the Facebook Picture)

Passive Aggressive Fridge Note

That’s My Spoon

Drain Hair

2% Fat (That’s Where Your Love’s At)

Oedipus Complex

55 Cents (Mi Goreng remix)

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Controversy

Every Monday night, Twitter is subsumed by #qanda. I rarely watched Q&A up until two months ago. I’d tuned in a few times before that, but I think I missed its heyday. If it had one. I was spurred by the ‘commentary’ on Twitter to watch it again.

Is it just me, or is Q&A really predictable? I brought it up with a friend the other night, and she said that Q&A‘s problem is that it’s run out of commentators. That the dusty academics who once breathed intellect into the show have been replaced by…something else.

When I heard that Richard Dawkins and Steve Fielding would sit on the panel a couple of months ago, I could see that episode in my head. A handful of commentators and a smattering of politicians. I don’t see what’s adventurous about seating an atheist next to a creationist. Or a Labor politician next to a Liberal politician.

Is balance about grabbing two ‘opposites’ and jamming them together? There’s something disingenuous (dishonest?) about the way that ‘balance’ is constructed.

I did want to hear Richard Dawkins speak, but Patrick McGorry was sitting on that panel. I wanted to hear him speak, too. The first question he got was:

Professor McGorry, in your experience do you think that belief in a transcendent being or in the transcendent in general is part of normal, healthy human psychology or is it a symptom of mental illness?

After a brief answer, Tony Jones deferred to Dawkins, and McGorry spoke little throughout the show.

Dawkins and Fielding were responding to audience questions but the audience is vetted, and Q&A opts for questions that pit panellists against one another. Given this, the idea that the Q&A audience is a representative sample of the electorate seems like a stretch.

When I brought this up with another friend yesterday, he told me that television is about conflict. Watching it, I get the impression that I’m supposed to feel excited, but I don’t get controversy from Q&A. I get a show that is self-styled as controversial, and that’s a different thing. The word ‘controversy’ is sapped of its meaning, when it’s so postured.

I’d rather read a book.

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If you’re a woman, you’ll love this

</sarcasm>

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Tangled wool

Last night, I untangled a ball of wool. Well, a section of a ball of wool.

It’s this beautiful Merino wool; soft and expensive. I bought about six from a batch of blue—almost grey. You should buy from the same batch, you know, otherwise you get different shades within the one dye. The wool is being knitted into a scarf that has taken nearly a year to complete. A lifetime, even. I used to knit lots of multicoloured squares to be sewn into scarves that looked lovely in my head, but never materialised.

This is more than a scarf: it’s a point of pride.

These balls of wool are wound unusually and the wool tangles easily. Untangling a ball of wool requires patience and dexterity. There is a fine line, though, between persistence and stubbornness.

I worked furiously on this bundle for about an hour and a half. I threaded and unthreaded. I narrowed my eyes. I ignored my mum’s reminders that I could snip around the knot and use the wool at either end for the scarf. I unpicked knots until fibres were frayed and I developed a cramp in my arm.

Sure, I was preserving good wool, but I could’ve deployed my time elsewhere. Weeks ago, my sister asked me to read Peter Goldsworthy’s Maestro. It’s one of her VCE texts and she wants to share ideas. I’ve barely started. I could’ve knitted more of the scarf. I could’ve written a blog post, a job application, a memoir.

Instead, I untangled wool and looped it around an empty toilet roll (that’s a good tip, by the way).

A second bundle sits impatient. The knots are squirming. Naturally, I’ll untangle it.

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The National Young Writers’ Festival: Sink or Swim

First published in Voiceworks (Edition #80 ‘Missionary’)

The annual National Young Writers’ Festival (NYWF) is a strange beast. In many ways it’s a great event, chaotic and packed with creative people. It creates a space for young people, which is something writers’ festivals often ignore.

Since the festival’s imperative is to represent young writers, it’s worth asking who ‘young writers’ are. It’s a murky phrase, tossed about with the still more vague ‘emerging writer’, which makes me envisage wailing writers being born from some kind of literary uterus. Are ‘young writers’ unpublished writers looking for ways to crack into the industry? Are they writers who are young, already published and seeking a platform to spruik their products? Are they zinesters selling their homemade media at the festival fair? Are they all of the above? These mutations of young writers—published; unpublished; self-published—embody the diverse nature of a festival that walks the line between resisting the mainstream and accepting its predominance.

A callout for new directors to coordinate the 2010 festival reads that the NYWF ‘champions emerging forms and practices that fall through the cracks of mainstream literary festivals’. The festival does this to varying degrees, but it also encourages young people to flourish in mainstream publishing—to drift with the current, not swim against it. Sarah Howell, co-director of the NYWF for 2009-10, says that the contradiction is obvious; both the mainstream and the alternative co-exist as ‘part of that process of people becoming aware of what their creative options are’. The two ideas of ‘mainstream’ and ‘alternative’ are not mutually exclusive, but the split between the two plagues the festival, as one often dominates the other. Often, the NYWF’s challenge to popular modes of producing and publishing media feels more conceptual than anything else.

There is much to be said for a festival that curates a space for young people and their ideas. Some NYWF attendees want to subvert the system, and others wish to wander its halls. Sometimes it’s a combination of both. Whatever the case, it is in that space between mainstream and alternative where writing and publishing will be its most exciting in the years to come. It is this space that is occupied by organisations like small presses, nestled somewhere between the international imprints and the zine stores.

The shortcomings of the NYWF have been endemic to the festival for a number of years. Some of these are external, like the location of the festival. Australian cities are geographically disparate, and many people can’t afford the trip to Newcastle for the festival. Usually the crowd is from a blend of the east coast states, while the rest of the country goes unrepresented. There are also problems inherent in a volunteer operation. A festival run almost entirely by volunteers is bound to suffer from logistical issues. Volunteer outfits hit bumps at high speed and sometimes this is part of the fun. Hitches can be as simple as a piece of equipment delivered to the wrong venue, or as complex as similar events scheduled concurrently in the program.

You learn much about the NYWF by looking at its program. You see the influence of DIY threaded through the profusion of panels, roundtables, workshops, readings and performances. The randomness is deliberate, so that people can choose from multiple events at any given time. The strength of this idea is its attempt at variety, but the downside is that some events have little to offer. On a panel that I attended in 2008 there was a self-published author, an editor who created his own journal and a couple of published writers. The panellists were disorganised and the whole session had a last-minute feel to it. The panel didn’t pretend to be a place for critical discussion, but it felt like a missed opportunity. Surely, panels are a place for discussion of some kind. If this session had been better organised it could have been entertaining and useful, but it didn’t feel like the panellists had thought of an audience beyond their friends.

Independent media and DIY movements are like neighbourhoods. If you live in a good neighbourhood, there’s a sense of community—different people on common ground, the pooling of ideas and resources. But neighbourhoods can also be insular, wedded to existing ways of doing things; and, frankly, who likes all of their neighbours?

While at the 2008 festival, I had the feeling that people were comfortable sitting where they were, comfortable with panels that wafted to and fro.  This was hard to reconcile with the notion of the festival being radically different from the bland offerings at mainstream writers’ festivals. A friend of mine who has long attended the NYWF told me that every year, out of the five or six panels and roundtables he attends there’s usually one session that hits the nail. I didn’t attend the NYWF in 2009, but some of the panels had a similar feel to the 2008 program. Panel topics like ‘Are poets nice?’ do not interest me. They encourage the anecdotal for anecdote’s sake, and panels are rarely interesting if they’re self-indulgent. Sarah Howell hopes to address some of the issues in the 2010 festival, noting that ‘the framework does need to be more rigorous to elicit those more interesting discourses, and that people don’t start wandering off into other areas.’

As the 2010 festival approaches, the NYWF still has a limited online presence. This is a stark absence considering how interwoven writing and publishing are with technology. The DIY ethos at the heart of the festival may be hands-on, but even zinesters are occupying the online world, using the internet to distribute zines far beyond the boundaries of the store. An enhanced online presence for the NYWF could go some way to including people from missing states like Western Australia, South Australia and the Northern Territory. Maybe one day the festival could be held somewhere besides Newcastle. It is the National Young Writers’ Festival, after all. Howell says that the gap in online communication at the NYWF is a resource issue, but it also depends on the festival directors. ‘If directors aren’t people who have a strong interest in online communication,’ she says, ‘then that tends to fall by the wayside.’

Every festival is a different animal, branded in small ways by the individuals at the helm. In discussing the festival with Howell, though, I noted from her comments how greatly the nature of the festival rested on the inclinations of directors. This individualism isn’t necessarily bad. For instance, Aimee Ingram and Daniel Evans—the two other co-directors of the 2009 NYWF—were from Brisbane. Howell argues that this gave the festival an edge compared to its usual Melbourne-centric years.

Yet if festival directors aren’t interested in online communication and the internet’s role in publishing, that doesn’t mean that these areas shouldn’t be covered. Thousands of artists in Australia take to the internet to write, publish and distribute their work and its absence from the program is conspicuous. If the festival aims to hold a magnifying glass to publishing, then linking the festival to the online world is crucial.

There may be fear that too much structural change—the maligned professionalisation of the arts—will be weedkiller to the festival’s grassroots, but a lack of structural change can have a deadening effect. The NYWF isn’t just different because it attempts to represent young writers, whomever they may be. The festival’s identity gives it freedom.

It sounds odd, but sparse resources can prove a blessing as well as a curse. The NYWF might be broke, but the less it has to lose, the more it can experiment. It’s also possible for the NYWF to smoothen its structure without sacrificing spontaneity. The repetitive elements in the festival’s program can be trimmed, and it would free up volunteers to seek those voices on a national level, to open up the festival online. The festival can plug some holes with a website that is regularly updated—a net within which to snag the ephemera so that it doesn’t evaporate the moment the festival ends.

After twelve years, the festival needs movement or it will be a mimic of its predecessors—a series of programs superimposed over one another. If nothing changes then the same people will attend the festival every year and the NYWF could become what it most dreads: just another writers’ festival.

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The interview

What’s that? Did you say ‘what time is it’?

I’ll tell you what time it is: it’s time for another one of Mary’s Brilliant Ideas. (applause)

Hello, viewers. I’ve decided that job interviews should take place in bars.

As a seventeen-year-old, I spent an entire year working my tummy into knots over the 15-minute French oral exam. In the end, it wasn’t that bad. J’ai un frère et deux soeurs, bléh bléh bléh.

Job interviews inspire the same kind of terror.

What’s the solution? Bars, bars, bars. Think about it. You’re always relaxed in a bar. You’re leaning back, you’re chatting. You’re cool. You’re calm. You’re the best version of yourself, or you’re tipsy enough to think so.

“Hi, I’m Mary. Can I have a glass of water?”

“No, but you can have a MAI TAI.”

If interviews were conducted in this setting, maybe I wouldn’t clam up. One day I’ll understand why I’m comfortable talking on radio, but not in interviews. Some switch will flick. Until then, I’ll turn bright red and jibber and want to crawl under the nearest piece of furniture.

At least I had the dress.

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Radio

Two months ago, I was taking the tram to work. My bike needed fixing and I’d been too lazy to wheel it around to the bike store. I listened to the opening minutes of a This American Life podcast called ‘House on Loon Lake’. It was an old podcast from a few years before and a curious one at that. The whole show was dedicated to one story. Normally, TAL has multiple stories and the smallest number I’d ever heard in one podcast was two.

The story is about three boys who stumble upon an abandoned house in New Hampshire and find it completely intact, as though the inhabitants left so suddenly that they didn’t have time to scoop up a handful of possessions. Those of us at home are advised to dim the lights.

I was on a tram and they don’t allow commuters to control the lighting, so I paused the podcast and switched to another. Let’s face it: when Ira Glass tells you to do something—you do it.

I kept remembering the podcast and I intended to save it for a night when I needed company, but not the company of people I know. Tonight, I filled a wine glass which I later noticed had grime on the base, so I’m pretty sure I spent that hour drinking dust. I walked the stairs to my bedroom, turned off the lights and half-propped myself up with pillows.

The story begins. Three boys break into a house and after ten minutes, I start hugging my doona. It gets dark outside, the light between the blinds fades and the wardrobe door is ajar. I keep my eyes open.

This is what makes radio brilliant. When you’re not given the visual, you’re forced to draw your own pictures. You’re relying on how well the story is told, but also on how well you listen. All minds are different, so no two houses on Loon Lake are the same.

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Multitasking

This evening, my mum offered to give me a lift to Fitzroy. In Richmond, there’s a section of Church Street between Swan Street and Bridge Road with a steep incline and woe to the cyclist forced to slog it to the top.

As we passed the church at the apex of the hill, I noticed a man riding slowly past us. He was reading a book that was propped up on his handlebars. I don’t understand how anyone can read a book while they’re riding a bike, and as a cautious cyclist, I can’t condone it.

Nevertheless, I admire the man’s ability to multitask. A terrific display of concentration amid the clamor of peak-hour traffic.

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Look at this map

Image: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Wapcaplet

In America, there are many state lines that are straight, like the borders were drawn by tape measure. In the west, you’ll see that it looks like the states of Utah, Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico meet at a single point.

If you could locate that point and stand on it, you’d be in four places at once.

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