It has been a challenging yet fruitful year for Australian student journalists. Student publications around the country have navigated covering the Palestinian liberation movement which refuses to slow down, turbulent funding and governance barriers and a tempestuous mainstream media storm. Nevertheless, student media has persisted — and by little pen strokes fall great oaks.
But when we refer to student media, we don’t just mean the weekly broadsheet newspaper that hails from the City Road windowless dungeon. We want you to think of student magazines, radio stations, periodicals, podcasts and social media channels fashioned out of passion and dedication. Student journalists invest their creative, professional and academic time into producing a project that holds up a mirror to their campus — and also turns our minds to a university we wish to see.
This year, Honi Soit has engaged with student media across the country and even traversed oceans to find what makes each of us similar, and also a little different. The weekend before last, we also saw the return of a beloved initiative, a Student Media Conference, which crammed student journalists like sardines into the spectacular rooms of John Woolley and the Education Building.
It’s a hackneyed excuse, but it’s true. Since COVID lockdowns, grand in-person initiatives have been difficult to get off the ground, and dreams of a Student Media Conference have been relegated to our minds… but armed with some serendipitously-acquired Student Services Amenities Fees (SSAF), these Honi editors made some Messenger connections and doggedly got to work.
The Student Media Spotlight weaved the vital fabric for the Conference in facilitating connections between interstate student journalists. When we began working on the Student Media Spotlight early in the year, we thought it would be a dorky passion project between regular Honi Soit tasks. It quickly became an underrepresented insight into the landscapes of university publications and their valuable contribution to campus culture.
The spotlight itself was born out of a camaraderie found during the coverage at the National Union of Students National Conference (NATCON) in Ballarat in December of last year. NATCON was a fast-paced, pressured experience of news and analysis coverage that tested the patience of publications like Farrago, Woroni, Empire Times and our own Honi Soit. Yet, we were able to forge an intimate bond over the course of four furiously-fast paced days.
Originally, we started the spotlight thinking not enough people know about other publications around Australia other than the few of us with too much time on our hands. We still think that. But what we found instead was that we are student journalists because we believe in expression and coverage of student matters like course cuts, staff working rights and the Sydney creative scene.
These student media spotlights would be nothing without the generosity, passion and collaboration of all involved. We often met on Zoom, late at night, due to flooded university schedule fatigue and looming publication deadlines but our conversations were never fatigued.
- Who’s who on the student media scene?
There are a whole host of student publications across Australia, far more than we have covered so far in the student media spotlights. In fact, even the Student Media Conference 2024 brought together only a portion of the student journalists toiling across the country.
Here is a comprehensive list of student media outlets across Australia, broken down by state. Student media outlets that attended the Student Media Conference 2024 are listed in bold:
NSW:
USyd: Honi Soit, PULP, and Surgfm.
UTS: Vertigo
UNSW: Noise
Macquarie University: Grapeshot
WSU: W’SUP
UoW: Tertangala
University of Newcastle: Opus and Yak
University of New England: Neucleus
Southern Cross University: FLUNK
Charles Sturt University: Hungappa and Interp
Victoria:
UniMelb: Farrago
Monash University: Lot’s Wife, Esperanto, RadMon.
RMIT: Catalyst and The Swanston Gazette
La Trobe: Rabelais Student Media
Federation University: Fedpress
Swinburne: Swine
Deakin: Wordly
VUT: Hyde
Queensland:
QUT: Glass
UQ: Semper Floreat
Griffith: Getamungstit
USQ: The Ashes
University of the Sunshine Coast: Scoop
James Cook University: The Bullsheet
Bond University: Bound
ACT:
ANU: Woroni and ANU Observer
University of Canberra: Curieux
South Australia:
Flinders University: Empire Times
University of Adelaide: On Dit
Uni SA: Verse and On The Record
Tasmania
University of Tasmania: Togatus
Northern Territory:
Charles Darwin University: Flycatcher
WA:
UWA: Pelican
Curtin University of Technology: Grok
Edith Cowan University: Dircksey
Murdoch University: Meteor
Give or take, there are currently 43 publishing student media outlets of which Honi is aware. 15 of these attended the Student Media Conference 2024 at USyd, including seven interstate mastheads.
- Student journalism past
As far as we know, the University of Melbourne’s Farrago is the oldest continuously running student publication in Australia since 1925. Four years later Honi Soit was born but so were two other publications, On Dit and Pelican from Adelaide University and University of Western Australia respectively.
For the uninitiated, here is a little refresher on how Honi Soit came to be: in 1929, a ragtag bunch of students came together to “force ourselves upon your notice, […] to strip the veneer, to open the cupboard on our skeletons, and those of other people, to tell the truth without fear or favour, and to assist our readers in their search for the Touchstone of philosophy — happiness.” In this introductory editorial, entitled “Why We Publish “Honi Soit”, editor A.E. Crouch set down the mantra that has swirled around Honi ever since: “we are iconoclasts.”
It was this iconoclasm that seemingly inspired our name, pulled from the motto of the Order of the Garter, displayed on the royal coat of arms: Honi Soit qui mal y pense — “shamed be him who thinks ill of it” in Anglo-Norman French. From its inception, our name was a piss-take, and one that sparked thousands and thousands of weary explanations from editors through the ages about what exactly it means.
This was the same year the USyd SRC was founded, an amalgamation of four smaller student associations. The increase in student media and representation throughout the 1920s was part of the post World War One breakdown of traditional class structures across Australia. The Labor party was growing as a political force for the first time and strikes became common.
Further, the modern University was rising to create something to fight. The first National meeting of University leaders took place in 1920 and with cooperation came professionalisation. USyd got its first Vice Chancellor in 1927. It’s fitting that the figure Honi goes after the most began its tenure with the paper.
Honi has been published weekly throughout semesters since, and has maintained a thoroughly counter-cultural, unabashedly left-wing stance through decades of change and political upheaval in Australia. From justly oft-remembered coverage of Vietnam War protests to unfortunately oft-forgotten championing of East-Timorese independence; from covering Tony Abbott’s stupol antics to antagonising the conservative press too many times to count — Honi has been a raucous student voice through the ages.
Its dependence on the SRC was not always so set in stone. In the 1931 SRC Annual Report, the President J.M Gosper suggested that the continuation was purely “experimental.” The survival of Honi until it gained the recognition of precedent, even during the heights of the Great Depression where University funding collapsed by 30%, is a testament to students viewing publications as a necessity, a feeling that is being eroded in a modern oversaturated environment.
In every student spotlight we realised the barrier of funding and budgetary restrictions was central. Editorial positions like Grapeshot from Macquarie University are entirely unpaid, with editors fighting tooth and nail for publishing funds let alone compensation for the hours they put in. Grapeshot’s current editors are grappling with censorship, but this is not a new issue for this masthead. In 2017, Macquarie University censored a one page article on sexual assault and and harassment on campus with this puppeteering strangling coverage on student activism for Palestine.
On Dit over at the University of Adelaide have struggled to publish this year due to censorship. Tensions between the student union, YouX, and editors in search of editorial freedoms erupted in 2022 when the union removed editor Habibah Jaghoori from office after she published an article in support of Palestine.
Others like Glass have experienced recent budget cuts but are still able to pay their editors for a set hourly rate per week. Almost every publication doesn’t compensate their contributors, a decision made either of budgetary boundaries or logistical terrors. Our neighbours, Vertigo, currently have no office and have experienced halving budget cuts twice in the past two years.
For most of Australia’s student publications’ lives, they have toiled in isolation. At least, or so we thought. The National Library of Australia holds a gem in its collection, “Worhoni soitharunka”, a 1967 joint effort between the three publications. Its editorial explains its impulses: “This merged issue of the three newspapers was due for a long time. What finally brought about its publication was the situation of Australia’s Tertiary Academic level”. Its cover reads, “Australia drowning: hanging on for our lives! Whither Australian universities?” reminding us of why inter-student media collaboration is so critical — the issues plaguing each university are widespread and systematic, and in some ways, timeless.
- Let’s get these scrappy journos in one room
Though we thought we were the first to ideate and host such a meeting of the student journalist minds, this was far from the truth. The archive’s first memory of a festival of student journalism dates to 1998, where a Student Journalism Conference was held in conjunction with This is Not Art (TINA) in Newcastle. Following this, a peak body for student media was established in 1999. Whilst TINA chugged along from 1998 to its disbandment this year, the Student Media Conference reached the age of seven before petering out. After the 2003 Conference, organisers secured a grant from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO), and published on the Student Media website (now only accessible via the Wayback Machine) that, “The NSMC has moved from a simple yearly conference to a major catalyst for change in the Australian community media sector.” Alas, it was not as sustainable as they predicted, having its last hurrah in 2005.
After the Newcastle Student Media Conference faded from the horizon, Woroni came to the rescue with the Australian National Student Media Conference (AUSMC), running in 2013 and 2014. The AUSMC website (also only accessible via Wayback capture) sounded the resonant clarion call: “It’s a well-established fact that young people love the sound of their own voices. That’s why almost every university and TAFE in Australia and around the world has a student media organisation: a newspaper, a magazine, a radio or television station, and/or a website.”
Meanwhile, a summer conference tradition sprung in Naarm/Melbourne. The National Editors Workshop and Skillshare (NEWS) Conference, running in-person from 2012-2020 (with an online iteration in 2022), was attended by most student publications in Australia (including a high school student newspaper in 2012). The programs selected curious candidates for the keynote speaker, ranging from former Australian Labor Party Minister for Finance Lindsay Tanner (2012) to feminist writer Clementine Ford (2013).
Our 2024 Conference unknowingly reproduced many of these ideas from our forebears, attesting to the timelessness of student journalist interests and concerns. The conference ran over three days hosting panels, roundtables and workshops from industry professionals such as Antoinette Lattouf, Kate McClymont, Wendy Bacon, Avani Dias and many emerging journalists to teach students about the state of their craft. We held reflections on past journalism like the Student Journalism Across the Ages panel and encouraged new mediations on creativity like Palestinian Authors Panel, Creative Writing and Cultural Criticism roundtables and New Media, New Challenges workshops. Over 1,200 tickets were sold with $900 donated to the charity, Olive Kids — an Australian Foundation dedicated to support the children of Palestine through the goal of providing financial aid, healthcare, education, and other support to children living in Palestine. When engaging with tertiary institutions, we cannot forget that there are no universities left in Gaza due to the ongoing scholasticide and genocide.
- Reimagining the possibilities
Jumping over to the United States, the university scene embeds student publications as de facto local papers to the college towns and cities built around campuses. Because of this, student publications are closely involved with campus news, academic faculties and volunteer societies. From speaking with The GW Hatchet earlier this year, the financially and editorially independent paper has produced weekly newspaper broadsheets since 1904, operating out of their own townhouse. It must be noted that the Hatchet is still a volunteer based publication. Others like the The Harvard Crimson, Columbia Daily Spectator, Daily Bruin, and The Trojan publish daily in line with the academic year, with immense support from their respective journalism faculties.
Unfortunately, student publications in Australia are far from this model if not entirely incompatible with it. For one, we cannot reconfigure the townships and physical landscapes of our campuses or Sydney college culture. Moreover, the decline of print media is not making that any easier to achieve. Budgets are being slashed and digital comforts continue to be more preferred than to sip and flick through these pages.
Regardless, there are pools of opportunities to build grassroots communities and movements of student expression. There is potential to expand the Student Media Network and the Student Journalism collab onto more campuses and even across the Tasman to our comrades in New Zealand.
Here they set the precedent for intercampus editorial standards with the Aotearoa Student Press Association (ASPA). Can we imagine an Australian Student Press Association or something thereby? Would publications like Grapeshot and Vertigo be able to fight off their institutional shackles? Would Victorian universities find the backing to revitalise their Victorian Intercampus Edition (VICE)?
To forecast the future of student media is near impossible. While student publications are under the control of tight funding or the editorial jurisdiction of their university management, student union or council, stability is not promised. Some publications have fallen to puppeteering, and others have been emboldened by it. These publications are one of the last bastions of unadulterated student expression which stands apart from mainstream, monotonous outputs.
The past, present and possibilities of student media is etched by the hands of every editor, contributor, reader, critic and peruser on campus. Lean on your comrades at other campuses and don’t forget there is no jo like stujo.
