It’s back. It’s better than ever. Tomorrow night, Cherwell Broadcasting re-introduces Shark Tales to the Oxford community.
Presented by: Samuel Juniper
Cameraman: Jake Solomon
Blog Page 911
Life Divided: crewdates
Pro (Jamie Onslow):
Crewdates! The mere mention of the word sends me into a state of uncontrollable excitement.
Ever since my first crewdate, I have been hooked. I have now reached a point where few other forms of social interaction hold any interest for me. Indeed, my compulsive desire to crewdate has led me to pursue the experience at every opportunity, as I strive to incorporate the pastime into all of my day-to-day activities.
My first crewdate was a modest, college-based affair, and the evening conformed to convention. The morning after however, I woke in a cold sweat with trembling hands—symptoms I am now all too familiar with as the tell-tale signs of a crewdate withdrawal.
Panicking, I hurriedly ordered a takeaway curry and devoured it in my college room, drinking Sainsbury’s house red from a polystyrene cup and occasionally standing to sconce myself. The symptoms passed.
I soon realised that one crewdate a week was simply not enough, and that I was going to need a reliable stream of crewdates to get me through the week. I had no option but to sign up to every sports team I could find.
This worked well for a few weeks, until, one by one, I was forced out of every team I had signed up for. This was due to my habit of turning up to practice late, my pockets stuff ed full of onion bhajis and dribbling chicken korma. I was often sent off the pitch for my behaviour, unable to stop hurling one penny coins at the opposition.
Sometimes I wish I had never gone on that first crewdate. I often feel that I am living just to chase a high that diminishes with every fix. Crewdating for me now is a lonely affair. I wander around Oxford’s restaurants, sitting down at random tables and forcing unsuspecting diners to drink wine from my shoes.
Let my story be a warning to future generations of students. Whilst crewdates may be the pinnacle of the Oxford experience, they should be enjoyed responsibly. Lest you find yourself unable to stop.
Con (Nicola Dwornik):
Ah, the crewdate: when students descend into drunken messes, revel in their vibrant sexual encounters and try to digest a mouthful of dodgy curry in-between.
Forget using Oxford degrees to rebel and formulate a new ideology. Us students turn into pigs and use our enthusiasm to vigorously throw up into plastic bags, under restaurant tables.
Perhaps the idea that we do all indeed turn into ‘The Beasts of England’ is a tad harsh. After all, not all crewdates are really bad are they? In many respects, one can feel quite proud of themselves for not sinking to the iniquitous depths of past Arzoo visitors. Failing to incite the kitchen staff to form a picket line (until all post-crewdate cleaning costs are paid) really should be seen as a success. Perhaps there should be good behaviour awards.
The unit of currency for the crewdate, besides desperation, is the penny. Just when you may have thought inflation rendered such denominations as ‘pocket change’, us bold Oxonians have given them a use.
Delicately dropping pennies into glasses both forces a compatriot to down their drink, as well as teasing their wine with a muted copper undertone. As if our Echo Falls White Zinfandel wasn’t aromatic enough already.
Alongside the chiming of pennies, “I sconce anyone who’s mum has had three penises inside her at one” (note: twin brother) is the type of melodious conversation that springs up between courses.
Isn’t it amazing how crewdates manage to keep up with 21st Century etiquette and small talk? Participants on male-only crewdates have been known to have been coerced into asking random girls whether they’d prefer to slap or kiss them, in order to frequent the lavatory. Apparently, ‘giving them a reality check’ is not an option.
Crewdates may now exist in a form closer to Bullingdon Road than the notorious club, but frankly I still just can’t see their charm.
Body, beauty and form: on dance and fashion
Fashion and dance have co-existed as mutual inspiration for hundreds of years. From the elegant lines and powerful choreography of dance companies inspiring the creative directors of leading fashion houses, to designers being tasked with creating costumes for dancers, there’s no denying the powerful connection between these two disciplines.
The 20th century charts the exchange between fashion and dance, especially ballet. From as early as 1909, the costumes of the Paris-based Ballets Russes (1909-29) reflected the daring and innovative choreography that shocked the public and transformed the face of dance in the 20th century.
This legendary company has influenced generations of fashion designers, from Paul Poiret to Yves Saint Laurent, who created an entire collection attributed to the orientalism of the Ballet Russes. The Russian costume designer for the Ballet Russes, Léon Bakst, is renowned for his rich and exotic costumes and sets, which roused an increased fascination with the oriental artistic world.
More recently, designers such as Christian Lacroix, Jean Paul Gaultier and Rodarte have created costumes for New York City Ballet, with Valentino even designing their fall gala in 2012. Karl Lagerfield also designed an iconic tutu for the English National Ballet’s production of ‘The Dying Swan’ in 2009.
Moreover, the ballet costumes themselves have influenced designers throughout the 20th and 21st centuries with Christian Louboutin declaring that pointe shoes inspired his avant-garde heels. Conversely, fashion designers have influenced the costumes of ballets, with Marc Happel, costume director of New York City Ballet, stating that his costumes for Symphony in C were inspired by Dior and Balenciaga’s designs.
Yet the most striking similarities between dance and fashion may be seen in the amalgamation of these art forms at runway shows, which emphasise the performance aspects of both fields.
Alexander McQueen’s Spring/Summer ‘04 runway show, titled Deliverance, was a unique fusion of ballroom dancing, couples dramatically running together on a fake track and interpretive dancing. This dreamlike performance was inspired by Sydney Pollack’s 1969 film, ‘They Shoot Horses Don’t They’, in which an elongated dance scene takes place during The Great Depression. Choreographed by Michael Clark and staged in the Salle Wagram, a 19th century dancehall in Paris, the clothing mirrored the performance with feathered skirts both complementing and offsetting Hollywood-era gowns and flashy body suits paired perfectly with men’s suspenders.
For designers such as McQueen, fashion, and in particular, the runway, is not simply a venue to display commercial clothing: it is an artistic performance in its own right, with the body used as a canvas for aesthetic innovation.
This is mirrored by how dance is not just relevant during the performance, as it has profound and wide spreading influence in our very culture, and has inspired some of the greatest artistic minds of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Do colleges have an imperative to help the homeless?
YES: The homeless are our neighbours and we have a responsibility to help them
Michael Shao
The following quote by John le Carré could not be more literal to the homeless people who reside in the Iffley Open House: “Home’s where you go when you run out of homes.” Around 36 people sleep in the space, which includes a kitchen and showering facilities. A petition has circulated with wide support to allow the squatters to stay, and Wadham students have supported the motion as well.
Squatters are indicative of many things. A place I love and hold dear to my heart, Motown, the lovely city of Detroit, home to several of my relatives, faces the problem of abandoned houses rife with squatters. Contrary to popular belief, many case studies done on the squatting ‘problem’ in Detroit have actually shown that in the majority of cases, squatters are much preferred to the counterfactual of abandoned houses with nobody living in them.
In the Brightmoor neighbourhood of Detroit, neighbours adjacent to an abandoned farmhouse actively advertised the empty space for squatters to take up. Their logic, one formed carefully after consideration of their personal observations over the years was that lawlessness would take over in the absence of tenancy by scrap merchants who sought to take apart the house piece by piece to sell. The physical evidence of houses that look like disassembled trucks is all too damning.
By no means am I comparing Oxford real estate to the much more severe problem of property abandonment in the municipality of Detroit: that could not even come close. What is noteworthy, however, is perhaps the parallel as to how certain people have come to view this issue, primarily critics of the Iffley housing project who seem to be in utter disbelief that people who have nowhere to turn to are living in a property that is not necessarily their own: not including Wadham, of course, who chose to supplement their decision with extra initiatives and well-grounded reasoning. In Brightmoor, the saying goes “Squatters mow the lawn.”
More optimistically, neighbours of the Iffley House share similar sentiments to the aforementioned neighbours of squatters in Detroit: instead of typically insisting that they move out in fear of loss of property value or endangerment, the neighbours near to the garage have been very supportive and some have even donated blankets to the temporary tenants.
The solutions that Wadham has proposed as an alternative, while with incredibly good intentions, are noted to be poor answers to a homeless problem that seems impossible to tackle.
The majority of people who are homeless are usually only homeless for a short period of time. Homelessness generally has a power-law distribution. The majority do move on with their lives, but a few stay chronically homeless, and those are also typically the ones who face serious mental illness issues and suffer from drug addiction abuse.
Typical investiture in shelters and donations like the furniture that Wadham has contributed to homeless projects, while an effective short-term solution, is impractical in the grand scheme of things.
Shelters do usually offer a place of residence, but even the ones in Oxford kick out their residents after six to nine months. Let’s not pretend that the ones who end up squatting haven’t already explored their options. For these squatters, perhaps suffering from more chronic homelessness, the squatting is the best resource they have at their disposal.
And as Wadham students have noted, if there are numerous other buildings that remained abandoned as well, it is a moral shame for Wadham not to contribute to alleviating the problem of homelessness.
Wadham does, however, plan to take the traditional road with the old garage that the city of Detroit has taken to address urban decline: the demolition of the building at the end of February, when conditions will still be relatively frigid.
In a twist of irony, their purposes for renovating the building, that being to provide affordable housing for students who find the cost of living well beyond their financial capacities, is the exact problem that usually forces people to turn to the streets in the first place. In the eyes of some, these squatters are those that form a picture of chaos: hard drugs, syringes littering the concrete floors, hard music, and poverty.
It would be foolish to deny the fact that many homeless people do face those problems, but more often than not, the squatter is someone who can’t afford to pay for traditional housing in Oxford, and lives in the Iffley House because the reality of the housing market is a cliff that cannot be scaled.
At the end of the day, they are our neighbours, aren’t they? Not just Wadham’s neighbour, but also our neighbours too. Just like anybody else.
NO: The responsibility for the UK homelessness problem is at the hands of the government
Matt Roller
Oxford currently has the second-highest level of homelessness per capita in the United Kingdom, and is the country’s least affordable city to live in. As house prices within the city continue to rise, almost no new council housing is being built, and housing benefits are insufficient: the number of residents teetering on the edge of homelessness is only going to rise.
Despite this, Oxfordshire’s two largest providers of shelter for the homeless—Simon House, on Paradise Street, and Julian Housing, in Abingdon—are set to be “decommissioned” within two years. The Conservatives’ £1.5 million cuts to homelessness provision across the country have left County Councils unable to provide for their residents, demonstrating ministers who have claimed to be serious about tackling the issue of rough sleeping remain ambivalent to the hardships that their decision has caused.
Whilst it spends more than £1m on homelessness support annually, Oxford City Council is far from blameless in this area. The council introduced the ‘Public Spaces Protection Order’ (PSPO) in 2015 which criminalised rough sleeping in the city centre, recognised by opponents as an attempt to “cover up” Oxford’s problem. Indeed, the body’s emphasis often seems to be on ‘dealing with’ the issue of homelessness, rather than helping the most vulnerable members of the city’s population by actually solving the crisis.
We can clearly see the two organisations which have played the most important roles in causing this situation. Firstly, the government’s failure to maintain a reasonable level of funding for city councils has directly contributed to the problems in Oxford. In 2015, then-Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne announced cuts to housing benefits, which the charity Crisis said would push “more and more people into homelessness” and even had the potential to “cost the taxpayer more than they would save.” The cuts to housing benefits may have helped the government cut back social welfare spending, but to solve the situation it has created, local councils require substantial funding. This is one of countless examples of short-termism from the Conservative government, which since re-election in 2015 has been intent on making immediate promises without considering their long-term societal effects.
Secondly, Oxford City Council’s attitude to rough sleepers and those without permanent housing gives them a duty to alleviate the situation. The council appears embarrassed about the city’s national ranking in terms of homeless people per capita, and has suggested that it “spoils” the city centre. There has been a long-term misunderstanding of rough sleepers, with the council’s actions suggesting they believe homelessness and rough sleeping is a lifestyle choice.
The example of the benches on Cornmarket spring to mind. These have been specifically designed so that they are impossible to sleep on, with arched sides and arm-rests between each seat. The PSPO also demonstrates that the council’s primary intention is to make the city appear clean and easy-on-the-eye for tourists, rather than to improve the lot of its residents.
Currently, several Oxford-based organisations regularly act to help out the homeless population. The Companions of the Order of Malta and the Icolyn Smith Foundation provide hot food and soup kitchens, O’Hanlon House helps the homeless to claim government benefits and provides shelter, and Just Love, a Christian outreach group, meets, chats to and buys food those without housing.
But the university assists too: as shown by Wadham’s campaign to allow squatters to continue to live in Iffley Open House, and OUSU’s ‘On Your Doorstep’ campaign, students help out at both college and university level. Most colleges also contribute generously to local groups through their Charities budgets.
Individual acts of charity and the actions of small groups are helpful as short-term responses to Oxford’s homeless problem, and demonstrate the importance of treating those who sleep rough as people rather than as some kind of plague. But without widespread intervention, the crisis will not go away. Although colleges are right to intervene where possible, the problem as a whole cannot be sorted by a social group, a charity or even a college.
Whilst admiring the acts of colleges when they do intervene, we must not expect them to solve this problem. This is an issue that needs to be tackled with council funding and sufficient housing benefits to give those without permanent accommodation a shelter. For these reasons, it is the government and Oxford City Council, rather than Oxford colleges, who have an imperative to alleviate the human crisis that they themselves have caused.
Instagram: the art of on screen reinvention
“Post this one—you look so good!”
“No, as you can see I’m on a blue theme. Can’t post this, will contrast too much with the general style.”
Designing one’s Instagram involves sacrifice, anticipation and careful editing. We can’t always post what our first impulse tells us we should. Or can we?
Well, according to Vogue, we can’t. But then since when has the leading high-end fashion and lifestyle magazine ever been of use to the common man and by extension the common Instagram-user? Is there a specific set of rules to follow for our Instagram to actually fit in, be recognised, admired or simply accepted?
To the question “What is worth posting on Instagram?”, Vogue answers “In short, anything beautiful, awesome, hilarious, or amazing that evokes emotions including but not limited to: laughter, appreciation, jealousy, inspiration.”
Instagram isn’t actually for ourselves: it’s for others. For others to be jealous (of your summer holidays), to be entertained (by a cracking caption), to be impressed (by a picture of you graduating). If I post a picture of a landscape and people like my picture, they’re liking the landscape. But if I post a selfie and people like my picture, they’re liking me.
Our self-worth today is based on a number of likes: we become an object, popular or not, on a page which we nevertheless control ourselves. We are simultaneously subject and object: posting a picture to showcase my life is like acting as a self-reflexive tabloid, creating another ‘me’ for others and myself. Externalising my own body, the ‘me’ on screen is not a mirror image. It’s an edited, designed, improved version of myself.
And obviously not everyone likes the Instagram version of me or you. What you think is an improvement may not seem so to others, which is why we tend to base the improved model of ourselves on popular Instagram accounts and ephemeral media trends (for instance hash-tagging used to be a thing, it isn’t anymore).
Although I’d like to think I’m not quite superficial enough to bother reading through the entire guidelines and actually express an interest, I found myself agreeing with the following: “The #blessed hashtag is only acceptable when used ironically”, “Are you a member of the Kardashian family? No? Then please don’t engage in the use of a selfie stick” and “Finally, please do not post pictures at the gym. Unless you’re working out with Jay Z and Beyoncé, nobody cares.” But then again, that’s just me.
Instagram can be extremely useful for advertising, campaigning and even promoting trends with a positive impact, such as veganism. Veganism may be a fad and has definitely seen a surge since it was popularised through social media and pictures of delicious looking vegan lunches, but it’s nonetheless a good choice to make, for environmental and ethical reasons. It’s just important to take some critical distance and not base our self-worth on what other people think of us, how many followers we have compared to x or y, what the like-follower ratio on our Instagram is.
Our life must not become filtered through social media. Sometimes, when I find myself having to take a decision, I very consciously think “Which option would look better on Instagram?” But surely, one day, we’ll outgrow Instagram and the Insta-me will vanish. Better start taking care of the actual me now, before another, newer media comes along and lets us showcase every step we take, every move we make (you’re more than welcome to sing that).
Already, things are changing. Beneath Kendall Jenner’s socialite stardom and Beyoncé’s flawless internet empire, people have managed to transform Instagram into a trivial meme forum and a place for more intimate personal expression: finstas, private accounts for the close friends only (bio example: ‘Up Close n Personal’). When the term first reached my ears, I gathered it was the union of the words ‘fake’ and ‘Instagram’. “How ironic”, I thought, “to imagine they’ll be truer to themselves on a ‘fake’ account.”
Having learnt since that the words associated to form finsta are actually ‘fun’ and ‘Instagram’, it all makes a little more sense. What it also tells us is that these private Instagram accounts with 20 followers or so are far more entertaining. People allow themselves to be more daring, explicit and unapologetically rude on their finstas, as they know close friends won’t judge and will be all the more entertained, as they share the same interests and sense of humour.
At the heart of finstas lies the idea of self-parody, self-deprecation and sometimes, if I may be so bold, self-memesation. But yet again, we’re only entertained by this because we know it will entertain others. At every like on our finsta post, we laugh a little more.
Preventing PREVENT in Oxford is an imperative
In 2015, the Counter Terrorism and Security Act created a legal obligation for public institutions to comply with PREVENT, which essentially attempts to ‘prevent’ people from being drawn into ‘terrorism’ and/or ‘extremism’. Teachers, doctors and university staff, among others, have since become foot soldiers in the government’s war against ‘extremist ideology’ and ‘radicalisation’.
Since its introduction, there has been a national campaign calling for the government to retract PREVENT, coming from countless sectors of society, including academics, teachers, students, doctors and senior politicians. But in November, the Guardian reported that a secret review urged the government instead to ramp up the PREVENT strategy, and just last week announced that King’s College London has warned students that their emails may be retained and monitored by the university.
PREVENT has been creating an atmosphere of fear on campuses that disregards students’ most basic rights, contradicts colleges’ responsibility to uphold the Equalities Act, the Education Act, and the Human Rights Act, and disengages students from political activity. In a frighteningly cynical and pernicious way, it is being rolled out under the guise of ‘student welfare’. As more and more members of staff and senior members of colleges—even, in some cases, fellow students— are being trained in PREVENT, we are witnessing the increased securitisation of student welfare.
In Oxford alone over the past few months, there have been numerous reports indicating the over-reach of PREVENT. Two weeks ago, a student had their room searched without their knowledge after scouts heard them reading prayers in Punjabi, and then was asked if they had been ‘radicalised’ by their college tutor.
When booking rooms for discussion events, students have been interrogated about the kind of ‘Islam’ they intended to ‘promote’, and other room-bookings made by a number of different religious and cultural societies have been blocked.
More and more students across the university are coming forward to report incidences where colleges and departments have obstructed students’ freedom of discussion and impinged on their right to privacy under the guise of this legislation. Countless other incidences are currently going unreported and unacknowledged because of the lack of transparency about what official college policies are: students have rarely been consulted in the creation of PREVENT policies, despite promises made to do otherwise.
What is particularly chilling under PREVENT is that university officials and college staff have effectively been given a carte blanche by the government to surveil students and obstruct their everyday activities. Tutors, welfare staff, deans and porters are now authorised to act on their own suspicions with impunity, possibly without even realising that in doing so they are creating an atmosphere of suspicion and fear. The incidences coming to light illustrate that PREVENT is doing exactly this: students are becoming reluctant to practise their culture and religion freely, they are reluctant to organise events that they fear will be shut down, and are increasingly weary of being visibly involved in contentious issues. These individual cases mask the larger point, the structural nature of the legislation.
Make no mistake—in a time of austerity and rampant Islamophobia at home and renewed British imperialism abroad, this legislation is designed to depoliticise and disengage the Muslim community from politics. It is aimed at the surveilling of an entire community, and the policing of the boundaries of what is considered acceptable discourse from them. It evolves out of the conception of an entire religious group as a security threat to be managed, rather than citizens with rights to be upheld.
PREVENT is therefore not particularly new or original—it fits into a wider strategy in at least three ways. First, it draws on a familiar racial discourse that forms a dichotomy between ‘us’ and ‘them’: entire groups are shrouded within a context of threat and insecurity.
Second, PREVENT must be understood within the broader context of surveillance and counterterrorism strategies in the post-9/11 era. These practices draw lines around particular groups, separating ‘the normal’ and ‘at risk’ from ‘the suspicious’ and ‘risky’. For these strategies to work, the state requires citizens to take individual moral responsibility for ensuring their own safety; we are told to ‘remain vigilant’, to be ready for a terrorist to strike at any minute, to monitor for ‘suspicion’ during everyday activities. This entails, essentially, reporting anything that deviates from what we deem ‘normal’—the way someone dresses, their political views, their religious beliefs or the colour of their skin. Under PREVENT, identifying features range from ‘appearing angry about UK foreign policy’ to ‘seeming isolated or withdrawn’.
Finally, PREVENT embodies a politics of pre-emptive identification of ‘future terrorists’, and it is this logic that erodes our rights and liberties in the name of ‘security’ and ‘protection’. At its most extreme, the logic of PREVENT dissolves our very notions of innocence and guilt. Suspects are no longer innocent until proven guilty, but rather guilty until proven innocent. And guilt is determined not based on someone’s actions, but on whether or not they conform to vague notions of ‘British values’. Recognising the structural nature of PREVENT makes clear: counteracting PREVENT is part of a larger struggle for global justice and the protection of our freedoms.
At the university, PREVENT stifles intellectual debate, endangers student welfare, cracks down on political dissent, and creates an atmosphere of fear and suspicion. Anyone who takes seriously the university’s position as a bastion of freedom of speech, as the protector and guarantor of all of our academic freedoms, must vehemently oppose this legislation and fight back against it.
If you have been affected in any way by PREVENT, please email [email protected]. The email is run by a group of students who will keep incidents completely anonymous if so wished. Get involved with Preventing PREVENT Oxford on Facebook to stay up to date with resistance to PREVENT
For more information on PREVENT itself, please visit http://www.ltai.info/what-is-prevent/
Quantum physics is invading biology
Traditionally, quantum physics is a bit like that friend: we know deep down that they’re probably right, but we’ll continue to ignore them for as long as possible, keeping our deluded ideas because they’ve worked so far. We can live with this until, inevitably, something goes wrong and there they are, taunting, “I told you so”. Unfortunately for biologists, that moment may have arrived.
In photosynthesis, the process that provides all the energy for life, sunlight splits up water into hydrogen and oxygen and excites some electrons. The electrons jump up and then fall back down, releasing excess energy. That energy is stored in chemical bonds and, in a roundabout way, is used by the plant to live.
Classical physics says the electron should take much longer to jump around than is observed and that it should lose much more energy to the surroundings than it actually does. In short, photosynthesis is smoother, quicker and more efficient than physics says it should be.
Now we can’t ignore the issue any longer. Physicists have observed the signs of quantum activity, namely quantum superposition, in photosynthesising cells. This would mean that an excited electron can explore lots of different ways to jump around simultaneously, thus finding the best way, losing less energy and saving time. For biologists, this was the pretty shocking—quantum activity is usually only seen in highly controlled laboratory test conditions, not in the noisy mess of a living cell.
While this new quantum theory comes with the usual scientific disclaimer that the activity observed may not actually be helping with photosynthesis in any way, it does seem to ‘fit’ neatly with everything else we know about photosynthesis, even if more evidence is needed for confirmation.
And there’s more. Not content with hacking fundamental biological processes, quantum scientists are also claiming to be able to solve other problems for biologists, what it is that gives each chemical its characteristic smell, for example.
The traditional theory is that different shaped molecules attach to receptors in the nose and produce different smells, but some molecules are very similar in shape, yet smell very different, whilst some molecules that are really different smell the same. Some scientists are saying this could be down to the quantum properties.
They say smelly molecules start a process called ‘quantum tunnelling’. Certain bonds in molecules provide a vibration that moves receptor electrons from one point to another via a quantum tunnel, meaning they don’t travel through the space in between. This would mean molecules have a tunnelling signature, as so to speak, for identification by the brain.
Annoyingly for biologists, there is some solid evidence for this, including the fact that sulphur and boranes have no molecular similarities, but they do have similar bond vibrations, and they smell the same. While, this is not proof, but physicists reckon soon they’ll have cracked the smell problem once and for all.
We are now ushering in a new era of complex quantum biology. Quantum mechanics has upgraded itself from the obscure branch of mind-bending science to something much closer to home. Gone are the days when biologists could be blissfully ignorant of this strange world, which may turn out to underpin many processes of life. Are we all really quantum machines?
The profound need for an Australian republic
The 26 January marks the 229th Anniversary of the landing of the British First Fleet at Sydney Harbour—now a national holiday down under, known as Australia Day. Australia Day is typically celebrated by the immoderate consumption of cheap beer, with any Australian in possession of a pool under a quasilegal obligation to have people around for a BBQ and a swim. Even in Oxford, on Thursday there were full-blown gatherings at Green Templeton College and the Turf Tavern where Australians (and others) can catch up and reminisce about our sunburnt country on the other side of the world.
Over recent decades though, the day has become considerably more divisive. Many refuse to recognise 26 January as a day to be commemorated—associating it instead with the beginning of a brutal campaign of colonisation that dispossessed the indigenous people of Australia of their traditional lands and way of life.
Increasingly, there are calls for a national day that represents a conscious and constructive act by the Australian people, and not merely by a British convict fleet. Lurking behind the Australia day question is a much more profound debate of who we are as a nation, and whether or not Australia should cut ties with the Commonwealth and the British Monarchy in order to become a republic.
The republican debate divides Australia into old and new; those who see our position in the world as an outpost of the Anglosphere, a derivative society whose political and cultural legitimacy rely upon Britain; and those who see Australia as a multicultural, cosmopolitan participant in the Asian century, for whom the old colonial ties with Britain have become an irrelevance. For the former, removing Queen Elizabeth as Head of State would signify an attack on our history and cultural heritage; for the latter, it would signify the final step in our transition to full nationhood and a clear signposting that both the oldest, original inhabitants of the land, as well as the newest arrivals from any and every part of the world, have a place in modern Australia.
Australia today is an immensely confused place. If you ask its citizens (and certainly if you ask Brits) to describe to you the quintessential Australian, the image that will be painted is inevitably the Crocodile Dundee type—usually a beer loving, parochial white larrikin who lives somewhere in the bush.
What’s bizarre is that this hasn’t been the reality of Australian life for quite some time. Today 90 per cent of Australians live in cities. We also have, per capita, more immigrants and more skyscrapers than any other major economy, and our GDP is the 12th largest (coming in above Russia and Spain). The days of a monocultural, internationally insignificant, rural Australia are categorically over.
The problem is that Australians continue to look at themselves from a 19th Century British perspective, a fact which stifles our ability to progress as a nation. Central to this is our status as a constitutional monarchy; as long as we have a colonial Head of State, and a colonial flag, the battle against a colonial self-image will be an uphill one.
The push to become a Republic doesn’t simply revolve around a desire for higher cultural self-esteem. The genesis of the modern nation state of Australia is irreversibly tainted by the original sin of colonisation—over decades of slow advancement the country we now call home was forcibly wrested from the indigenous population by European Australians.
We ended some 40,000 years of aboriginal history, committed a genocide in the state of Tasmania and stole a generation of mixed-race children from their mothers. The deep and lasting wounds sustained by the indigenous community in Australia are unlikely to ever fully heal, and the deep-seated sense of mistrust will take generations of hard work by committed indigenous and non-indigenous citizens to erode.
We, as a nation, are grappling with a healing process that at times can seem almost impossibly difficult, one that is continually frustrated by enduring racism and revisionism. We quite simply cannot embark on such a process while our highest source of political authority is a representative of colonialism and while our flag is the same as the one under which indigenous Australians were at one point classified as fauna. The movement towards a Republic would recognise an Australia which has thousands of years of history instead of two hundred.
To be clear, the calls to become a republic are not, and never have been, connected with hostility towards the United Kingdom, or even specifically towards the House of Windsor.
The republican debate within Britain itself is one that Australia has stayed well clear of, and ultimately one that deals with quite a separate set of issues. Unlike in Britain, the Monarchy is not an institution that holds a great deal of cultural significance to the Australian people, nor is it an institution we can really participate in. Nobody looks at Queen Elizabeth as a personification of the Australian State, nor as a symbol of Australian-ness. Removing the royal family as the final source of nominal authority in the Australian political system would not, therefore, signify any ill will towards the Monarchy, it would simply signify that the Monarchy doesn’t make continued sense in the context of the modern Australian political landscape.
Referendums on the issue have failed before, and the Australian republican movement needs to agree on a common vision of what exactly their goal is before any serious progress can be made. However, with the Prime Minister, the Opposition Leader, and every state Premier supporting making the leap, the future is looking brighter for the prospect of an independent, inclusive and culturally distinct Australia.
A fusion of movement, light, and sound
Illuminated, the latest production from Quicksandance, is an innovative fusion of light, sound and dance. Currently running at the Keble O’Reilly, it is a captivating spectacle which manages to excite and surprise throughout its all too brief runtime. The show—consisting of ten distinct but interlinked dances—impresses with its variety, pivoting from one style to the next in its exploration of the idea of light. It begins with a solo dance, a slower piece which seems to be contained in a circle of darkness before expanding outwards.
From there, the dances segue into one another. In one, the dancers are mimicked by shadows behind a gauze, forms which reveals themselves to be other dancers. The dancers struggle with their shadowy doubles, before slamming their hands upon the gauze and dissipating the shadows. In another dance, three performers are separated into different circles of darkness, each moving within their own prison. Each routine is invested with a sense of drama, of intrigue.
The drama could not be achieved without the interplay of sound and light. The show soars when taken as a whole, each part of its design merging with every other, each constituent element bolstering and elevating the next.
The minimal set—some white cloth draped across the back of the stage and along the floor, and some spheres dangling from the ceiling—seems plain, almost bland, at first glance. Yet this allows the show’s wonderful lighting to transform the performance space, the bright, block colours evoking multiple different atmospheres.
The show swings from bright pinks and blues, to alluring greens, to stark whites, each shift allowing the dancers to dive into the next routine with vigour. The globes, meanwhile, are suggestive: bubbles of shadow one instant, celestial orbs the next. Furthermore, the sound design is more than a mere backdrop against which the dances can play out, instead, it is an integral part of the experience, a complex array of aural sensations which is synchronised with the lighting.
The slow thud of a heartbeat signals the beginning of the production, the music flares when a male and female dancer collide with one another, when circles of darkness break up the light, distortion ripples across the soundscape. The use of surround sound enables the production to envelop the audience, seeming to swallow them up in the proceedings. The whole show is seamless, each piece of it flowing into the next until it becomes impossible to separate one specific element from another.
Only when taken in its entirety can Illuminated truly be appreciated. Every element is impressive on its own, but they interanimate one another in unexpected ways, creating an experience which arrests the senses. The feeling of danger which dominates one dance between a male and female dancer is enriched by the sudden flashes of light, the immersion of the throbbing music. This interweaving of parts is vital to its success.
Playful when it wishes to be, disconcerting when it chooses, Illuminated is adept at leading its audience through its world of intertwined light and sound. More than anything, it demonstrates a cohesiveness of vision across the entirety of its construction. The dances could not exist without the light, the light without the sound, the show without any of them. This cogency—and the sense of completeness that follows from it—makes Illuminated a triumph.
Matt Ridley on ice ages, bird watching and cultural evolution
What made you decide to study zoology at Oxford?
I was a passionate naturalist from the age of about ten, having been introduced to birdwatching by my father. Birdwatching got me into natural history and natural history got me into the biological sciences. A zoology degree represented the chance to study animals and animal behaviour—I just saw it as a way of studying my hobby I suppose. But I had done enough biology to realise by then that the concepts of evolution and genetics were absolutely huge ideas, and why would one not want to spend one’s time looking at huge ideas?
You’ve been actively involved in science communication for several decades now. Has the general public’s perception of science changed since your time at Oxford?
I think these things do change, but possibly they don’t change as much as we think they do. There was a little bit of a revolution going on when I joined science journalism in terms of saying, “Hang on a minute, genetic engineering is happening, microchips are happening, we’ve got to explain these things to our readers”.
When I joined The Economist, a man named Richard Casement had gone to the editor and said “Look, it’s absurd that we don’t have a section of this magazine devoted to science and technology, will you let me start one?”. He started out by doing some fantastic basic explanatory things: what a silicon chip was, what genetic engineering was. He’d get right into the nuts and bolts of scientific ideas.
For me, getting really deep into what causes ice ages and so on has always been the fascination. This allows you to have a debate with your reader about something that is both esoteric and complicated, but explainable if you use good metaphors. You don’t want to patronise so instead you simplify. That’s what I’ve always wanted to do, whereas an awful lot of what passes for science journalism just very quickly scoots straight over the science part, then goes straight to the politics of this specific scientific issue. There is a market out there for curiosity about the world and not everything has to have a political angle.
In the opening of your TED talk, ‘When Ideas have sex’, you talk about how often scientifi c concerns are blown out of proportion. Whose fault is this?
I’ve seen this happen again and again, whether it’s on GM foods, fracking, climate change, the ozone layer… Often there is a real problem, but also a degree of exaggeration and indeed hysteria. I think the blame lies partially with the media which will always report sensationalist, exaggerated versions of the truth.
But there is another group called pressure groups, the NGOs, who often play a very large role in hotting these things up. We’ve seen it with Friends of the Earth being rebuked by the Advertising Standards Authority this month for mistaking the risks of fracking. There is quite a big industry of that going on, more than there was 30 years ago.
Those are the two main culprits in my view, but scientists have to take some of the blame themselves, because the temptation to exaggerate the problem and therefore increase your own funding is definitely real, to the extent that if you publish a paper saying that “Actually this problem is not as bad as people think”, then you are at some [level] threatening the budget for your own work. But I don’t think it is quite as cynical as that in the minds of most scientists.
Science at its best consists of Professor A saying “This is a problem” and Professor B saying “Nonsense, you’ve put a decimal point in the wrong place”. For me, science works when everyone is pushing their own agenda, with their agendas often in different directions.
In your TED talk you go on to discuss the evolution of human culture, emphasising the importance of exchange between cultures. What makes exchange so important?
I’m convinced that the invention of exchange—me giving you a fishhook and you giving me a fish—may have played a very large part in the development of modern human society and in the sudden explosion of prosperity that we have seen in the last 200,000 years. The argument comes from a lot of fields: psychology, anthropology, biology, economics and the understanding of the non-zero sum nature through which both sides benefit. The more you specialise then the more exchange you can do, the more you can exchange, the more you can specialise.
You can look at more recent archaeology to see what’s happening on islands like Tasmania where people were isolated for 10,000 years: culture went ‘backwards’, became ‘simpler’. So for me the blindingly obvious elephant in the room that a lot of anthropologist have neglected is the role of exchange in driving culture.
What particularly intrigues me is that when you look in the animal kingdom this kind of exchange of diff erent things at the same time, rather than the same things at different times, is virtually unique to human beings, with some very minor exceptions. It’s also apparently unique to modern human beings, with quite good evidence beginning to accumulate that Neanderthals didn’t do this. They only ever used local materials for their tools, implying there was no exchange over long distances. I think that exchange is the key to understanding the modern revolution of 200,000 years ago. It’s all about how intelligence became collective and cumulative.
Do you have any advice to young students looking to get into writing and journalism?
It’s not as easy as it used to be because the revenues of the media have dried up almost completely, thanks to Google. There is much less opportunity for professional careers in journalism than there used to be. That’s, I’m afraid, a rather depressing thought. It means that a lot more journalism is amateur. Through mediums such as social media people can contribute in all sorts of ways, so it’s a much more open profession in that sense, but I would be wary of making it a whole career rather do it alongside something else.