The earthy smell of sodden books hit me well before I could see them. A growing mountain of steaming, charred textbooks that, only a few hours before, had been snuggling on the Deakin Rusden library shelves in 1997.
Now they sat, awkward and exposed on the footpath as firemen dumped armloads more from within the blackened walls of our campus library. Deakin Rusden, almost forgotten, was a small, creative campus locating stumbling distance from The Notting Hill Hotel. When not stumbling, we made films that ignored cinematic convention (for better or worse), wrote and performed theatre that we took very seriously, and printed black and white photos by the dozens.
Later, we erased the vinegary smell of the darkroom with the musty smell of draught on tap (that penetrated even the most repellent of 1990s fashion fibres). We learnt about sound, tapestries of it, the challenge of naming 10 individual sources of it in our environment, how to use it, how to trigger things in people with it. We learnt about cutting 16 millimetre film under high stress.
I grew dreads, played covers of anything that was flowing out of Seattle at the time and drove a 1980 Toyota Corona. I did not have a mobile phone, payphones were still being installed, my friend gifted me an email address that he created for me. Cash was very much still king.
When we went to access a webpage we often typed in the entire URL (Google was founded in 1998). Once I visited the page of American band Tool, that took 15 minutes before appearing on my beige coloured, square monitor. I studied with city kids, country kids, some wonderful Singaporean kids.
At university I was exposed to things I loved, things I’d prefer to forget and things I have long forgotten. There was an incredible diversity of music, media, people and stories. There was confidence to tell Australian stories. People still said ‘niuews’ and not ‘noos’ (news).
I told a girl once that I was heading up the coast to go surfing over the Christmas break. Much to my delight, she invited herself to join me, and then the day before we left, invited one of her girlfriends, too. We were young and deeply restless. Victoria was unknown to most of us, Australia a mystery.
We had no money to do anything and it didn’t matter. We were both hopeful and worried about the future, so living in the present made good sense. That year, a group of 3rd year students staged a rave on campus. An installation artist arrived and built an organ that was powered by bursts of flaming LPG gas.
My university was wild, unhinged, and exciting. As musical flames split the darkness and my synapses, there was nowhere else I wanted to be. Weeks later, flames cost us our library. The sentimental amongst us salvaged titles of interest from the footpath. Most of us were too occupied with what life had to offer to stop.
