University

‘Trent mainly went to University for a social event’

-Tracy, St Albans

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🌯👹

You used to walk around constantly there, in between tutes that were sometimes hours apart. You’d hope to run into someone, but the place was huge: 30,000 students was a small town, and you didn’t know its rules and conventions. There was no easy opening to sit and talk to anyone and if you did, it had to have been arranged; there was no hanging out. Early on you had arranged a meet-up with two boys from your high-school. The were as lost as you. One wore ADIDAS and you knew they were flying the flag from home, as time went on you knew that was a hopeless task, the other students didn’t want to know you that way. No one cared about where you came from: you met them at their point of contact and it seemed to be about the moves you were making and the new things that you were doing. At lectures you sat awkwardly, wanting to walk around the new spaces the ideas made in your mind. The wealth of knowledge that you could access about artists and writers that you knew naively from your childhood and adolescence were laid out with incredible detail. You met it with reverence that bordered on the religious. By your home LGA’s standard you were already between 2-5 years behind most people in there in terms of literacy and further in terms of advanced learning. You scribbled notes furiously however, because you were afraid. You were failing already and didn’t know it.

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🌯👹

You used to arrive on Swanston Street every morning by tram if you had the guts to go in in the first place. You would keep your head down and take on a set. The place thrilled you; moving on thrilled you. Everyone that constituted a peer passed by you at all times: a constant stream of people changed the way you viewed people from static and suburban to complicated, glamourous and ephemeral; they constantly seemed to be in a state of flux and renewal. You kept that cosmopolitan mindset in some way for the rest of your life. You can thank Uni for that.

Only gay men seemed to befriend you. You naively felt that you thrilled them somehow, but you sometimes felt it was because you were poor and it was livening up their blood. Maybe they were poor too, you felt later when you looked back on it. At the time people that talked to you seemed to be collecting specimens like you, seemed interested in things other people weren’t and you thought that at least was appreciation for who you were. They didn’t know what it was you was offering, and you had friendship with them, and you would go to clubs and be hit on, and you were greedy for the attention and the life, but you weren’t that way in the end, and so you eventually parted company with them.

The girls at university didn’t seem to want to know you and they rarely met your gaze. They gave scared appraisals when they did look at you, but it never came off badly for them, you figured with a sense of alienation that gnawed, there was something about it all that had you know that you were vulnerable to a bad outcome and they weren’t. The clothes they wore became the way you knew them, and you perpetually felt too damaged, too weird, too underclass, mainly too nervous to talk to them during tutes. There was a sense of independence about them that just was not there in the girls at home, and reminded you of the women in your family, which was a welcome relief. They seemed to hate the idea of men taking a patronising stance against them, you thought you could clearly tell that, and at tutes they would target you as representative of a male energy that they hated. You were low hanging fruit, you also imagined that they wished they could tell their boyfriends to show solidarity with them, a working-class asshole who was put in his place, but you never let them—you were too smart for that, you got in there for a reason—you owned tutes when you could, but on rare occasions you had a  way of making them look at the floor after a point was scored on class or authenticity. In retrospect it becomes apparent that you were angry at some of them, however you didn’t know how to name that emotion then amongst an undifferentiated rage you always held at whoever or whatever came along.

It was said to be the most prestigious University in Australia, and you made points that you shouldn’t have with your accent and clothes. Often, you surmised that they couldn’t compute how that had happened with someone who looked and sounded like you. None of them wanted to date you, and you thought immaturely that they never wanted you there in the end. There were girls from blue-chip suburbs who were too dumb to be there, and they looked at you beaten, you sometimes settled the question for them. The redeeming fact about you was that you had no power like they deigned to, and they forgave you what they wouldn’t normally with other men.

🙏

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👹🙏

One weekend you went to a bar in Toorak road. Your friend relayed that at other times the bouncer wouldn’t let guys like you in there and he had told him that much. They were rich kids in there, very rich. You hung around the bar with more in common with the bar staff. You saw her there, she hung around the wall. You told your friends that that you had loved her in first year, they loved the narrative and the drama of it and grinned, she had dropped out, she was non-academic, she was rich and happy anyway, you could tell, you had thought you had loved her, she was luminous when you saw her, you had tried to chat her up in art history, she smiled as if to say ‘what are you even doing?’. You thought she would be someone to begin things with. Your friend went to talk to her for you, she politely shook her head with a smile. Your friend came back and said ‘I tried to chat her up instead, sorry!’ dripping with a humility that you are ashamed not to have recognised in him at the time.

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👹🙏

It was beautiful at times to drive or train through the city at dusk for a purpose—no longer a hood-rat day in the city with mates— to go to a student play or go home from lectures. The trees along the streets framed the architecture which seemed alive and beautiful, especially when the weather was changing, it was emerging as a city that you could experience with the eye of an adult. You couldn’t name the schools of architecture that were emerging in conversation with your friends: brutalist, Bauhaus, art deco, but you were all getting on top of these things as you drove around in commodores on the weekends later. You all already had more knowledge of these things than the rich kids who did the same degrees, you thought. Perhaps now you can accept that that seeing the city so vibrantly was a sort of gift that they who owned the city by birthright would never be entitled to.

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🎱👹

You were all vicious when you got a reprieve from the dry universities you were going to. You didn’t care enough about the bullshit there in everyday life, you just wanted to release from it. You were all in the best courses in Melbourne for what you were all doing, but no one cared about that, you kept it in your back pocket, unsure of what to do with it, you all didn’t seem to be bred for the ideology of student life. The ‘wog’ mantra ‘it’s all bullshit’ was used liberally to keep you all moored to your past and you shared the entitlement of people who were brutalised growing up to get away with what was needed to bust through and enjoy a Monday or Saturday night clubbing. At other times you would hang out with friends in a shared space that more resembled a family get together with the connections to your past that you all had. You wanted to get away from your family, but you couldn’t bust in, and you would spend nights there getting drunk and high until you couldn’t understand where you were anymore, and it felt like you were free of it all.

The conversations that you all continued night after night as you drove around in your Commodore were illogical and tangential but you all believed in them, however you also believed in tearing it all down, the clubs, your pasts, because you didn’t understand it all and felt there was no place for you. You should have understood that the macho things you did, like drinking whiskey as you drove around deciding on a club was not a way to meet the world anymore. You didn’t get it, you sometimes hated them, but they didn’t seem to care at all about the destruction you were all enacting on any idea of a future. You moved well away from opportunity so you could all act the worst that you could at dingy clubs with people who seemed to have no idea about the wider world. It made you feel superior somehow. You all followed the logic of your notions from club to club and gallery to gallery until it got so boring you had to fuck shit up. The old habit of cruelty and burning each never died, it just developed into something more sophisticated.

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💀🙏

That’s what they don’t get: just about everything out there. You stroll the streets of your university precinct, they didn’t want you to go there. You have a mental picture of Chris seeing you on the street in your neighbourhood and asking what you are up to, you tell him Arts at Melbourne University and he’d look at you like you’d just tricked him. Head cocked back and eying you out, wondering what the next unlikely thing was. He’d shake your hand after you’d smoothed that aberration over and swagger down the street after you’d talked about other things. They didn’t want to know about the big bad world, they had no time for university, let alone myths like the University of Melbourne, it was another world for other people. The friends you held onto from high school came along for a bit. They were just as perplexed, you talked about all sorts of things, they were dilettantes too, philosophy, art, their way, unless they were in a course themselves. After a while your education kicked in and they started boring you, and you realise now how you bored them too. You couldn’t smoke dope anymore and so talking about it wasn’t fun, it was illogical. Sitting on the bonnet of a car watching the planes fly over wasn’t going to do it anymore. They’d peeled away, they needed to survive, you didn’t know that you did too, that was much later. You were lost in ideas and books and wondering why you smelled so bad. You were hungry but you repurposed that for ideas. But you lived at home with your parents and that killed you slowly every day. You desperately wanted out. The friends that still talked to you seeded every conversation with that question, what would you bother? They were curious, but only so much. They left you behind in their own way as well.

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👴🏻🙏

You arrive back your local shopping centre after going home to regather from a tantrum you had inside. You had tried to put two lots of $18 across after the groceries were not bought due to insufficient funds and your credit account has swallowed it up. You are skint. You feel a caustic drip in your guts because you know you need the eggs you were buying, but you need The Age more than eggs so that you can have some sort of chance of getting a job to make it through the gap in your work schedule. You leave and let the groceries remain on the self-checkout

You resolve to be as friendly as possible when you go back, but your shoelace comes undone when you get through the door, seemingly to test you. You are ready to pick up all the stuff from the shelves over again, but the woman you had talked to tersely last time in frustration, whose nametag names as Aroosh, calls out to you holding the bag you left behind up with two hands. This is fortune and this is luck, you know what that is, and you are ashamed and grateful to her, but you cannot understand her and why she is doing this. She seems to be trying for a management position, or perhaps just doing her job well in way you can’t fathom, and she VIPs you through the checkout in front of some people who take it with an uncanny grace and she checks you through. She calls out to a man who she has seen from the corner of her eye. He seems down and out and is carrying a grocery bag. She asks him to come over and let her look through it. He refuses, saying it is from ALDI, she insists again, and he refuses again and starts walking away. She takes a photo of him with her iPhone and keeps checking you out. You don’t know what to make of it. You and your friends used to laugh at stuff like that, criminals like him and their techniques. You did it to feel smart. You were smart, but you didn’t deserve to have to be, you didn’t deserve to be casing criminal minds all the time as everyone did out there as they grew up. You think about Aroosh and how unlikeable she was even though she helped you out. They seem to rely on it out here, forced coded civility, but you are grateful for the grace it has allowed you this morning. Life seems unrelentingly complex and rich to you as you drive home to circle ads in a newspaper.

You think of the obstacles you faced just getting through high school. You couldn’t put your hand up in class to answer a question without being shouted down and being called a nerd. At parties you had to navigate the constant persistent eventuality of violence. People as you see them here don’t seem to have had it like that, but somehow you need to be civil and nice to them and make up for a deficit. It’s unfair but it seems cemented in the way we imagine, or fail to imagine, class and equity in Melbourne

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👴🏻🙏

You’re sitting at a spot in Lygon Street. There is a man sitting on the rim of a bench with his feet on the seat. He is dark with a beard and a puffer jacket and he is riffing. He is ridiculing the use of neoliberalism by his peers while sprinkled in a barrage of vernacular you recognise from home in the North and Western Suburbs. A kindly woman, perhaps a tutor, seems to be ministering to him. She is so nice it is almost painful. She is letting him fly, keeping eye contact and making sure he doesn’t lose confidence in his ideas. You know this man, you were him. He breaks in and out of his flow and suddenly switches to lyrical brilliance that rivals what someone could read in a book. She is not understanding him on purpose. She is older than him, she is wise, but she doesn’t want to lose her place in the world. He will fail, there is no place for him there, you almost want him to drop out to prove a point. This woman cannot know his brilliance, she does not understand what it takes to be that way. She is Melbourne Uni prosaic and she is dumb in her own way, however she knows how to hold on in a way that works.