Great Snakes!

Snakes alive, Snowy, the snakes are alive!* And ready to party with the best of them. Little yellow signs have cropped up in the flowerbeds, bearing the fearsome slogan: SNAKES SIGHTED. As it stands, no snakes have been sighted by me – rumours of a brown snake sunbathing on the steps outside the bike shed have been chased away by my deliberately loud footsteps every time I ride to uni. A fearsome hissing from ground level sent us running indoors when we attempted to study on the balcony, but who knows what that actually was. Probably just an Australian taking a low blow at the weird internationals. But it’s not just snakes who have started to get friendly. Bluetongue lizards roam the corridors unchecked and spiders attempt to scratch their way through our window frames.

Not getting bitten, eaten or killed is fairly easy, though, as it’s all about mutual respect. Snakes are cool. They’re just doing their thing – whether that thing is slithering around the short grass of the memorial garden or setting up camp in the laundry room, which happened last year. Same with sharks. I for one am a big snake rights advocate. Just so long as they don’t come too near me.

In other news, classes have finished, and my time at Unimelb is almost at its end. Last night I drank wine from a mug on the balcony and perched on the fence at the viewing platform over the Merri Creek, the city a warm shadow on an orange sky. The heat broke at around two and I woke at seven to thunder and lightning. I lay on a park bench in the hammering rain and let the downpour drench me.

*That’s a Tintin reference, for the uninitiated reader.

On our first day of enrolment at Unimelb, Sarah, Louis, and I captured the rather marvellous self-portrait you may admire below. Look at us: young, fresh-faced, and innocent, toothy grins hardly masking the trepidation boiling in the pits of our stomachs. We were the newbies, thrown together by chance, Yarra House, and the 546 bus. We were as unknown to each other as the coming months.

Fast forward twelve weeks and here we are again, quite unintentionally, bright red and beaming at the end of semester ball. The photos from early evening were much more elegant, but this diptych is all about realism. The night gradually unravelled into rakish chaos, much like the bow tie of a certain wildly dancing Flo Rida fan. Gone are the newbie nerves, and with them any vestige of coolness which, like a faerie glamour, might once have persuaded me that these two were anything less than the wonderful weirdoes they truly are.

And these pictures, dear reader, sum it all up quite nicely.

Bumper pack tonight, kids. But watch out. This week we have five swears and one potentially R-rated bedroom.

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 “Why won’t you let us into your bedroom? What are you hiding? Is it a mail order bride? Or a guinea pig?”

“No, Miriam, Justin Bieber’s not a social construct. He’s just a fucking prick.”

 “Cute sweater vest!” “Thanks. Classes may be finished, but style never goes on vacation.”

"Where the fuck is the fucking bus? Shit, why do I always swear? Shit."

"I'm going to wear my deadlines as my Hallowe'en costume. Because they bloody scare me."

The Tragic Inevitability of the Passage of Time

The sun is out, the wind is warm, and Australian summer is on its way. Blustering breezes and blistering heat* propel us along Heidelberg Road as we cycle towards Parkville, bags full of books and eyes on the sky. It is getting increasingly difficult to study when the world outside the library window is such bright blue.

Despite having reached the final week of classes, I’ve been surprisingly relaxed. This is not St Andrews. No claustrophobic cobbled streets, no gusts of wind pursuing you down them. I am so much happier in a city. And yet there are things I miss about St Andrews. I miss the small classes and knowing everyone’s name. I miss Classics and studying texts rather than Ancient History and archaeology, my subjects here. I miss my friends and the bizarre small-world sense that somehow everyone knows one another. Perhaps I am glad I was given a semester abroad rather than a year.

No. I can’t type that sentence honestly.

Since coming back from Tasmania I’ve just been living. Little else. It is so wonderful just to be. I lay in the brown-sugar sand at Brighton Beach and swam in the Tasman Sea. I explored the painted, café-crowded laneways near Flinders Street and ate doughnuts in the sun by the Yarra River. I danced in the train station, danced in the kitchen, danced in the laundry room. I mistook a lizard for a snake, twice, and saw my first huntsman spider. Summer is coming, and with it the beasts they all warned us about.

*25 degrees does not actually blister me. No sir. I’m just taking poetic licence. And marveling at how this isn’t even summer yet.

Winterbourne, who supported Patrick James when I saw him live back in August, have released their first music video! They are up and coming and kept talking about how much they hated Geelong (a nearby city which is not, to my shame, pronounced the way it looks), having had an unenthusiastic crowd at their gig the night before. Have a listen. They're pretty fab, and Geelong evidently didn't appreciate their talents.

Lewd and crude, this week's instalment of Top Quotes contains three whole swears. Cover your eyes and ears, young children.

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“Nobody should be self-conscious about how they look. I
don’t care if you walk into the room with a boat on your head like Marie
Antoi-fucking-nette, I won’t judge you.”

Through a mouthful of someone else’s food: “Why would you
leave chips in the Games Room if you don’t want them to get stolen? Like, come
on. You had to see this coming. It’s not my
fault. Get your shit together.”

Scrawled on a library desk: “When I die bury me next to
bitches.”

On Tasmania and Birthdays Abroad

It wasn't until midsemester break arrived that I realised just how much I needed a rest. I went straight from class to Tasmania, travelling for two days from Launceston to Hobart via, among others, Wineglass Bay, a beautiful curving beach reached via scrambling rocks cast with the dappled shadows of eucalypts. In Hobart we spent two days ambling slowly from cafe to bar, as well as visiting the infamous MONA.

The Museum of Old and New Art was founded by multi-millionaire gambler David Walsh. From the surface, it looks like a shopping centre mid-renovation; inside it's a web of windowless stone catacombs worthy of a movie supervillain. Upon entering you're given an iPod loaded with information about the artworks. Most people would just put a sign next to the art, but Walsh is too rich for that. MONA is a thrilling lair of decadence, its art a combination of the grotesque, the humorous, and the macabre. One room stinks of shit from an artificial glass digestion machine; 151 vagina casts line one wall like stag heads in an English country manor; a beanbag cinema displays around forty Madonna fans singing the Immaculate Collection. A bloated red Porsche squats near a waxen little girl who is entombed, glassy-eyed and drooling, in a rabbit hutch. A carved door is notable for its caption: 'David made too much money on this trip to South Africa, and had to spend some before leaving the country.'

I also met a wombat joey called Tina. Photo by Sarah.

While in Hobart we stayed at the Pickled Frog, one of my favourite youth hostels. Cheerfully decorated, with its own bar, cafe, and very lovely staff, the Frog is the place to be. Not least because of Baloo, an enormous three-year-old malamute, affectionately dubbed the 'resident wolf'. I've never been so in love.

BALOO.

I’m not very good at birthdays.  I’m a people pleaser. I’m very indecisive. I’m a massive fan of democracy. Being the designated centre of attention for a day is something I always find pretty daunting.

And, of course, I’ve never done it so far away from home before.

Fortunately, I have some super cute friends here.

We ate a lot of food – Indian dinner, cheesecake, Lentils breakfast, pub pizza. We hunted out bars in Hobart and did a lot of beer tasting. After arriving back in Melbourne I had a nap and was woken by a knock on the door and presents from two friends I hadn’t seen while I’d been away. I lay on the grass outside with two friends and talked about the ups and downs of study abroad. We went to the city for pizza, then found ourselves firstly in a terrible Lizard-esque club and finally looking out over the city from the Rooftop Bar, my new favourite tourist trap.

Birthdays are all about the people you spend them with. It was strange to be so far away – no breakfast with Christina, no evening with Harry, no family within an hour of my term address. But it’s the people I’ve met here that meant that, despite being so far from home, I had something to celebrate.

Cheesy or what?

In the scrapbook this week is a spot o' Yeats, prescribed by a Red Cross poet doctor, some gratuitous Shakespeare, marriage equality rally scraps, and some Tasmanian travels.

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