Goodbye Unilife

My final 48 hours of studying at the University of Melbourne can be summed up in three scenes. First, the false flat of Heidelberg Road up which I cycled as though on stilts, legs not quite long enough to reach the seat of the bike I’d been forced to borrow, breathless, from a taller friend 40 minutes before my exam. Second, emerging from the exam hall to the sight of the Carlton Gardens fountain, water from the mouths of stone platypuses falling golden in the summer sun, my mind brighter, another box ticked. And third, my bedroom at 3am that night: picnic blanket on the floor, final essay three quarters finished, bike-blackened hands typing away until a knock at the door and three cups of tea signalled the sleepy arrival of friends. The next afternoon, I was finished. I have done little but sleep since.

Melbourne Uni has been so different from St Andrews. There’s the same bustle, a similar workload, but the location makes all the difference. My course back home certainly suits me better, and absence has made the fond heart grow fonder as regards the St Andrews Classics department. I love Swallowgate, the old boarding house where all my classes take place back home, where wind rattles the glazing and breakers surge up white from the sea. I miss Alcaeus and Homer and Herodotus - no Greeks for me this semester. But I will miss this city so much when it is finally time to leave.

Yarra is emptying out. Doors stand ajar, white Ikea showrooms scrubbed pristine behind them. Things will be very quiet when I return from my travels. But that’s okay. I have a lot to enjoy in the meantime.

It’s Melbourne Music Week and Queen Victoria Market has been transformed into a concert hall. On Friday night, Architecture in Helsinki took to the stage, supported by the wantonly gyrating, long-johns-clad Total Giovanni. Architecture in Helsinki were formed in Fitzroy, the much cooler suburb just down the road. With bright pink jackets and five albums under their belts, they’re definitely the neighbours whose parties you want to get invited to. And despite their success, they stick to their local roots:

“This song’s about the East-West toll road. It’s a terrible idea. Any Liberal politicians in the audience tonight can fuck right off.”

“Summer’s coming. Time to set Victorian Spider Identifier as my homepage.”

“I don’t want to leave! Can someone please handcuff me to a gum tree?”

“I’ve never prank called 000 [999], but I did force my friend to call 666 once. She’s dead now.”

 “God, jewellery’s so expensive. Who do you think you are, spending that much money in one go? The one percent?!”

[This article has been edited. A previous edition stated that Stephanie Elizabeth Laucks merely persuaded her friend to telephone the devil. Ms Laucks emailed to assert that force was most definitely used.]

The End is Nigh

It’s 6am and I’m woken by the red dawn washing like watercolour behind the silhouette of the eucalypts. Red mingles with gold and blue, birdsong with the hum of cars. In exactly a week, all my assignments will be complete. The past week has been hectic, full of hurdles and turning points, and this one will be, too. But Melbourne is big and blue and busy and as I cycle down Swanston Street into the city I think that, if I must be stressed and worried and tired, there is nowhere I’d rather feel that way than here.

Having completed two classes (!) and treated myself to an early weekend, I am ready to face the library again. Amid the chaos there are many things I am thankful for. Bicycles. Balconies. Green tea and the gibbous moon. My favourite tree, which crouches outside Ormond College in the perfect position for climbing. Carlton Gardens, looking almost European in the sun, rainbows shining through the mist of water droplets kicked up by the fountain.

It’s not all work. The end of October was aca-crammed with performances at a very swanky old folks’ home, a 1920s themed university do, and, finest of all, a small yet sparkly karaoke booth on Bourke Street, to which I caught the train alone in full Halloween costume. I also experienced the joys of Long Room all-you-can-eat tapas, which I heartily recommend. Ten days later, I’m still full. As for the future, travel ideas are becoming realities. It’s almost the end and I’m caught momentarily in the empty space between memories and future plans. But it’s not for long. Time passes so quickly here.

I was warned that Halloween in Australia wasn’t much of a big deal. The warnings were false – at least as far as Yarra was concerned. Polka dot scarf and can-do attitude firmly fixed atop my head, I cavorted and careered around the Games Room, an alien Rosie the Riveter performing some absurd imitation of what I believe they call dancing. Our ersatz attempts to blend in with the human race were documented by the weird yet talented Flash, whose testimony to the evening may be viewed below.

Yarraween from LV Media on Vimeo.

Cheers to a week of PG-rated conversations.

“God, distance is hard. He’s so far away I want to die. But he’s what I live for.” 

“Hmm. Doesn't that just make you kind of neutral?”

 “When Harry Met Sally is so stupid. Of course guys and girls can be friends. Just like brothers and sisters.” 

“Can brothers and sisters just be friends? Game of Thrones begs to differ…”

“Are you okay? You’re awfully quiet this evening.” 

“Actually, I was just thinking about what a wonderful muse Harry Styles has been for Taylor Swift’s new album.” 

 “I can’t study in my room. It’s like a prison cell. God knows how the priest managed to teach Edmond Dantès comprehensive philosophy, history, and ethics in the Chateau d’If.”

 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.

-

“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.

x

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

The daily journey into the city has been a bit of a nuisance. Fifteen minutes waiting for a perpetually late bus which takes half an hour to get to campus. I'm, like, so done with that, man.

It’s week 9 and I’ve finally sorted out both my life and a bike. (Zeugma.) Better late than never, right? A great thing about res is being constantly surrounded by helpful people. With the aid of a few res-mates, I now have a third-hand bike complete with helmet, seat, and working brakes – all without spending a cent. I bought some lights and a lock for a total of maybe $40, and, after a few chicken-outs, am finally on the roads.

I’ve never cycled in a city before. In St Andrews, I’m never on the road for more than fifteen minutes at once. There are two lanes and some nice shortcuts through the park. Here we’re a clattering crocodile of uni-bound cyclists as lorries zoom past the bike lanes of main roads. We set out in sunshine and came home in pouring rain. It’s real city cycling.

From my so far limited experience, Melbourne is very cycle-friendly. There’s almost always a bike lane. Helmets are a legal requirement. We left res as a group of four, but by the time we were nearing uni we were part of a flock. Melbourne is not really a public transport city – I’ve never been somewhere before where I’ve actually seriously wished I could drive. But though it’s a car city, it’s also a bike city. I hadn’t realised until this week how much I’d missed having my own wheels.

I’ve spoken a little about how things are different in Australia to the UK. But it’s not all external – I’ve noticed I’m pretty different in Australia, too. I’ve had a chat with some other internationals about this, and found that, in different ways, we’ve changed.

Or maybe we haven’t changed – maybe different aspects of our personalities are just emphasised. It’s funny how malleable you are depending on the situation. Priorities change when you’re somewhere big, when you know your time is limited.

In St Andrews, I’m rushing everywhere. I leave the house at eight thirty in the morning and return home no earlier than ten at night. I’m active and outgoing, my days meticulously planned and constantly busy. I thought I’d be like that here, if not even more so.

Instead, I’m quite happy just soaking it all up. I’m floating slowly through life, enjoying the little things: cooking in the shared kitchen on a busy weekday evening, wandering through the city with no clear purpose, spending time with the friends I’ve made rather than being constantly on the lookout for new people. It bothered me when I first noticed it, this newfound quietness and slowness. But it’s an appreciation for the small things, I’ve decided. Quality over quantity. In St Andrews, you have to seek out entertainment – but Melbourne itself is entertainment enough for me. 

Every week, the uni hosts two bands. Some of them are local, some from further afield. There's free beer and a barbecue - with classic Australian hot dogs made from sandwich bread. Broods, an up and coming New Zealand band, played in one of the first weeks, and I've been listening to them a fair bit since. Lend them your ear - this music video landed the same day I did.

Off to Tasmania tomorrow. Have yet to pack or even write a to do list in preparation. I don't even know what time the flight is apart from somewhere in the broad region of 'afternoon.' Time for an adventure.

Busy busy busy

I am not going to write about the referendum here. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. It’s all I’ve been talking about. It’s all I’ve been worrying about. So I’m going to write about something else.

Over the last few weeks I’ve been so busy. The mist of coursework fell heavy across the land, and my home became overshadowed by the stormcloud of important political decisions. But I still found time to get mobbed by parakeets, stalk Tony Abbott on his University of Melbourne visit, acquire a rickety yellow bicycle, see the Twelve Apostles on the Great Ocean Road, compose a nightclub anthem, book a holiday to New Zealand, and buy a tacky little landmark ornament, my signature tourist purchase for every city I visit abroad.

Today we went to St Kilda and had lunch at Lentil as Anything. Lentils is a chain of five vegetarian restaurants run entirely on donations: rather than paying a fixed price, you give however much you can afford or think the meal is worth. The food is delicious, so well worth the suggested price of (to my memory) around $15 – but the donation box means that you don’t have to feel bad if you can’t spend that much. We also had a wander around - and lie down - at the Veg Out Community Garden.

I am midway through the semester and my days are spent in the library, my evenings in the city, my nights in the shared kitchen, and my money on coffee. (Zeugma.) Summer is on its way. My time is beginning to run out. I’d better make it count.

Simple steps to creating an Aussie nickname:

1. Shorten the word to one or two syllables.

2. Add 'o' on the end.

That's it. Congratulations. Servo, bottle-o, Johnno. Works every time.