It’s 3.30pm, Sunday April 14 and I’m procrastinating an Honours assignment. I’m writing this from the lawns outside the Quad. I’m trying to catch the last of the sun. Campus is busy for a Sunday.
The space is full of tensions. Chau Chak Wing Museum lies down over there, not really targeted to students. Fisher and its fortified security scare students away. I remember when I, years ago, with the help of some former Honi editors, managed to sneak onto the Level 10 roof as the sun set. From there, the campus was beautiful. But sometimes this is all for the wrong reasons.
Honi is another space filled with these competing ideas. Supposedly a ‘radical’ student newspaper, its radicalism is continually eroded by its barriers to editorship and its siloed nature. If people keep using ‘the paper’ as a careerist tool, can it ‘maintain’ its left-wing idealism? Two things can be true at once. Perhaps it is radical in its existence — a publication where students can publish, be mentored and join a community — all without overbearing financial incentive.
I wonder who is reading this right now. For history assignments, students like myself comb through real/digitised sheets of newspapers and periodicals. I wonder if this will one day be done to this paper. I hope students today and tomorrow find a sense of intimacy when reading these pages — in the familiar settings, feelings and issues. Our lives are worth literary attention.
The sun is falling fast, I’ll probably move soon. I can already feel myself getting nostalgic about this.
Pitch to us, create for us, write for us. I know you want to. A publication is only as good as its contributors.
