I am definitely in a different place to when I last posted, and not just literally. At the end of my stay in St Kilda I moved into my new apartment in Notting Hill. And no, it's not like the one in London! Notting Hill is a pretty insignificant little suburb with almost nothing there apart from some major road junctions and petrol stations. However, it is right next to campus and allows me a pretty little 10 minute walk through the university's 'Aboriginal Garden' to get to my classes. The apartment itself is beautiful, brand new and has a great roof terrace with BBQ facilities. My housemates are Carlos-Eduardo and Fernanda, a lovely couple from Brazil- he is doing a PhD at Monash and she is working. The flat still isn't fully furnished and we are without Internet, but at the weekend I invested in a duvet (called a doona here) and some nice bedsheets and cushions to make my room feel more homely. And so I am feeling very settled.
I have also completed my first two weeks of semester. I found my first day a little daunting and I had a much stronger feeling of being a 'new kid' than I'd expected to have. In my first lecture- a geography class, not my area of expertise- the teacher asked a lot of questions and I was surprised to find that everyone contributed eagerly. I'm not used to this in a lecture and tried to keep my head low so no one realised how clueless I was. Luckily everything has become easier since then, and I am getting used to the slightly different dynamics of classes here.
It seems that I've chosen my units well, and they all compliment each other even better than I'd expected. My easiest class is 'Exploring Contemporary Australia', a first-year level course aimed at exchange students to help us settle in and understand this strange and foreign culture around us. There is no exam for this unit, and 60% of the assessment comes from a weekly reflective journal about our experiences in, and observations about, contemporary Australia. The first assignment is a video presentation responding to a self-guided walking tour around some of Melbourne's western suburbs, an area outside of our usual radius, as we mostly live and study in the eastern and south-eastern suburbs. I did this walking tour with my friend Claudia at the weekend, on a scorcher of a day. First we saw Footscray, an interesting place with a very diverse community made up of Vietnamese, East African and hipster populations. Our walk took us through Seddon, a more upmarket and quiet district with more trendy shops and attractive cottages on leafy green streets. We finished in Yarraville, with its lovely Main Street complete with bookshops, cafés and the Sun Theatre cinema. From here we hopped on a train to Williamstown, one of the first settlements in Melbourne, where a penal colony was established and a couple of grisly murders were committed by the convicts. Despite this history Williamstown was delightful, with a beach and nature reserve that allowed stunning views across the water to the CBD.
After all this walking under the sun, not to mention getting lost more than once, Claudia and I were knackered and I was hit by an incredible hunger that will be familiar to those who know me. Therefore it will be understandable to hear how disappointed I was by the fish and chips I bought from a little pier-side chippy that was filled with people. It's amazing that so much British culture arrived with the early colonists that Cockney rhyming slang was spoken in Australia, but still white Australians have failed to deliver on decent fish n chips. So after my meal I was full but far from satisfied. Nonetheless, the views in Williamstown were beautiful and a ice cream as we walked to the station for the two hour journey back to Clayton was a nice end to an interesting and exhausting day.
On Tuesday we had another field trip related to the same unit, although this one was as a group. In the morning we went to the National Gallery of Victoria and joined a number of school groups who were also having a guided tour of the gallery- we were the only group not wearing gingham dresses, knee high socks and Panama hats (really). I had been to the gallery before but with a guide the artworks were contextualised and explained to us. I was particularly interested in Frederick McCubbin's 'The Pioneer'. This painting had caught my eye when I last saw it, but sitting down and having a discussion about the artwork helped to further explain its significance: the painting consists of three panels telling the narrative of a couple who presumably had just arrived in Australia from England and were beginning a new life. In the final panel, the city of Melbourne can be seen appearing through the trees. We concluded that it is a representation of the vision of Australia as a land of new opportunities and freedoms (at least for the white settlers who arrived there). The gallery displayed Aboriginal artworks around and alongside such colonialist pieces to signify the parallel history.
We had a three hour break in the afternoon which Claudia and I spent relaxing at Flagstaff Gardens. When we met up with the group at the Koorie Heritage Centre, an Aboriginal culture and history educational centre, we were surprised to be taken back to the park again by Lennie, our guide, who was an Aboriginal man (although admittedly I didn't realise this at first as I saw him as being a white man, and did not realise there were some Aboriginal people who don't have dark skin- I now know otherwise).
Lennie explained how Flagstaff Gardens had been an Aboriginal camping ground for thousands of years, although there are no memorials to this history in the park, while there are memorials to other things, such as the burial site nearby the grounds. He also found some possums in the trees for us to look at it; in Australia they are overpopulated and carry diseases, but are still a protected species. Aboriginals traditionally make clothing from possum skins, but now have to import these from New Zealand to make their traditional cloaks. We returned to the centre for more Aboriginal history and to see and feel some of the exhibited items.
I am also taking a unit from the Indigenous Studies department, called 'Race and Power'. I am finding this one very interesting, particularly as a follow-on from the African American history module I studied in Liverpool, which focused a lot on critical race theory and the study of racism. I like the way the tutor is structuring the course- half of the readings don't relate to Aboriginal Australians but provide some background in the study of social constructions of race- last week we studied Edward Said's 'Orientalism' and this week looked at a chapter from Frantz Fanon's 'Black Faces, White Masks', a very poetic and moving account of his frustrations at being defined by others primarily by his skin colour and not by his intelligence or life experiences.
I am also really enjoying my literature unit, which is called 'On the Road: Travel and Representation' and looks at the histories of travel and travel writing. I was very excited when I first found this unit and am so glad to be taking it- it is very much up my street! This week we have been looking at some travel accounts from the 14th to 18th centuries. It is fascinating to see how travel writing was essentially synonymous with fiction at a time when audiences had never travelled and would basically believe anything they read- such as John Mandeville's claims to have seen one legged people whose feet were big enough to shade them from the sun. Jonathon Swift satirised this very well in 'Gulliver's Travels'.
Next we came to the 'Grand Tour' concept of 18th century Britain, in which aristocratic university graduates would travel in order to become more refined and cosmopolitan. It's interesting that the concept that travel is good for the individual is still almost universally accepted, and seen as a praise-worthy enterprise that will make you more wise, mature and employable. But, as our teacher pointed out, perhaps travel can also narrow the mind, if one carries too much of a sense of cultural superiority and stereotypes of the places they are visiting, which may well be the case for the Grand Tour experience. This to me sounded a lot like Said's concept of orientalism, that argues that western perceptions of the east are more of a reflection of their own culture than the one they witness and comment upon. Therefore the readings from all my classes seem to help my learning in the other ones, and some of the things I learnt in Liverpool last year are applicable here too.
But it's not all been about studying of course, and I hope it never will be! As I write I am en route to Sydney to spend a long weekend with Chris and to do some sightseeing. Like most budget travellers I chose to travel with Tigerair, and like most passengers with Tigerair, I now find myself over an hour delayed. I hope I will be boarding soon, and I can't wait to get out of this miserable boarding lounge and arrive in one of the world's greatest cities, which I haven't seen in ten years.
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