What does an Australian university remind you of?
Universities are interesting institutions these days.
That is not to say that they are as interesting as they used to be.
What they used to be is what I still love but can no longer find. A thing to immerse yourself in, a sentence to skip over and delight in; a thing of politics and passion; torn t-shirts and slogans written on skin; chants in the hallways and joints on the lawn.
The first time I committed myself into a university was in 1994. Sydney University. Two steps from Newtown and a skip from the CBD. It beat the solid rhythm of a heartbeat, a soul rendered in sandstone and gothic, shards of light falling on the faces of the revered and dead.
I spent the days of an 18 year old with my feet submersed in grass, a copy of Nietzsche under my arm and an argument resounding in my head. I would go to the Manning Bar in the evening to hear the clap of pool balls against timber and ivory, a spoken word concerto plucked by an invisible bow across the tongues of professors of philosophy and literature.
Australia still believed in the classics then, still believed in the smell of books, had yet to devour itself, madden itself with the odour of money, of sub-contracting knowledge, of decimating the soft guidance and wisdom of metered words and ancient voices.
We still believed in politics as something behind the camera and the flash, as something not yet known to the hair stylists and crouched, measuring tailors. We still remembered the flash bang passion of Hawke; the broken-nosed Gorton; the unbridled hope and devastating gate crashing of reality during the Whitlam administration.
We still believed that if you put enough people on the streets with cardboard weapons and sharp edged ideals we could win a fight.
We have tried again but the media budget wasn’t big enough. The bombs fell anyway.
Now we look at the photos in Time editions that cost $19.95 a pop (the saturated colour annals of history will cost you dear. The price you pay for making history glossy and palatable), and look upon the faces of ghosts. Another failed revolution. We think of salaries and funding. We think of what we can cut and what won’t hurt too much.
Put a department out of it misery like a sick horse and pray people still use public libraries, but perhaps we can do without them as well. Keep the business section.
I hear the sounds of stilettos and the polyphonic ring of a new age. Supposedly we are so technologically adept that we no longer need to read.
I can no longer enter the bar barefooted and the only cause I can hear loud and clear is the “cause of me”.