SYN celebrates 10 years of young people on air

By RMIT | Published: 15/05/2013

Tahlia Azaria

Tahlia Azaria, RMIT Alumnus and General Manager of SYN Media

SYN Media is a not-for-profit media organisation run by a community of young people, providing training and broadcast opportunities to those aged 12-25. Based on RMIT’s City Campus, the station itself has just celebrated ten years of radio broadcasting. Tahlia Azaria, General Manager and RMIT Alumnus (Bachelor of Communication (Journalism)), spoke to RMIT University about the organisation’s growth and future plans.

What is SYN?

I’d like to think that SYN is an environment where people can come and meet other young people and learn more about the industry, but also learn more about themselves. People really build on their communication, teamwork and confidence skills while being a part of SYN. They also get a real opportunity to make their mark on the media and to launch their careers.

How are SYN and RMIT connected?

SYN came out of RMIT over ten years ago, when RMIT’s Student Radio Association amalgamated with Thornbury-Darebin High’s Radio Station, and went to bid for our broadcasting licence. After a really competitive bidding process, SYN was only one of very few stations to get the licence for free. Having RMIT’s support at that early stage was crucial. Read More »

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Striving Against Realism: Peter Corrigan’s Theatrical World

By Michael Kantor | Published: 13/05/2013

Architect Peter Corrigan, best known locally as the designer of RMIT’s iconic Building 8, is also a master sorcerer of the Australian stage: a weaver of dreams; conjurer of magic tricks; architect of outlandish angles, clashing colors, and optical illusions. His imagery is at once achingly beautiful, frightening and emotionally devastating, and always revelatory.

This week audiences will be able to see Corrigan’s set design come alive within RMIT Gallery’s exhibition Peter Corrigan: Cities of Hope (12 April – 8 June). Kate Kendall (Neighbors) will star in The Lover, a one-act play adapted from Marguerite Duras’ best selling novel. Corrigan’s extraordinary pop-up set within the gallery reveals him as a master craftman of ephemeral, temporary spaces.

Peter’s “poor theatre” aesthetic is particularly well-suited to the realities of making theatre in Australia, especially the type of theatre makers that Peter has been drawn to – often on the periphery of the mainstream, peddling a contrary representation of the world to the realist trap that features so much on the middle-brow stage.
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Bangladesh disaster shows why we must urgently clean up global sweat shops

By Sharif As-Saber | Published: 08/05/2013

BANGLADESH BUILDING COLLAPSE AFTERMATH

Could the collapse of Rana Plaza in Bangladesh’s Savar district be a catalyst for reform of the global sweat shop trade? AAP/ Abir Abdullah

The disastrous building collapse in Bangladesh’s capital of Dhaka which has killed hundreds of ill-fated garment workers and wounded thousands, has finally shone some well-needed light into the murky business of global sweatshops.

Greed, profiteering, empire-building and a lack of transparency and morality underpin the rise of this industry.

Following the collapse of Rana Plaza in district of Savar, the European Union – the destination of 60% of Bangladeshi garments – is threatening to reconsider the Generalised System of Preferences (GSP) extended to Bangladesh through which the country currently receives duty-free and quota-free access. The United States is also considering this action.

The Retail Council of Canada has also proposed new trade guidelines with Bangladesh in response to the disaster.

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Prevention not prison: justice reinvestment makes dollars and sense

By Peter Norden | Published: 03/05/2013

Silverwater prison in NSW

Silverwater prison in NSW. Australia should be spending more to prevent people going to jail than on housing them in facilities like this. AAP/Paul Miller

Australia spends billions of dollars every year on our prison system yet the number of those being sent to jail keeps increasing.

Is this sustainable? Simple logic would suggest not, unless we want to start actively cutting health and education budgets to warehouse criminals.

Wouldn’t we better off spending that money more wisely, trying to prevent people ending up in jail rather than providing facilities when they are sentenced to custody?

“Justice reinvested” may sound like a new term here in Australia, but the concept is one which I have been urging for more than twenty years.
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Why Queensland didn’t need to sell the family farm

By David Hayward | Published: 01/05/2013

Queensland Premier Campbell Newman

Queensland Premier Campbell Newman announces his government’s plan to outsource, rather than completely privatise, many public services. AAP/Dan Peled

Back in July last year Queensland Premier Campbell Newman was in a very black mood. All was gloom and doom in the Sunshine State, as he warned Queensland was “on the way to being bankrupted” without tough action. Back then, his government was shaping up to do a Jeff Kennett, painting the grimmest of pictures that would justify massive cuts to the Queensland public sector, just as the former Victorian premier did in his first term in power.

Yesterday was the day when it was all meant to come together, with Newman having to make the biggest call of his political life. In announcing his government’s response to an audit of the state’s finances, he had to decide whether his Government would support the sale of major pieces of Queensland’s “family farm” – particularly the state’s multi-billion-dollar power assets.

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Conferring to change the world

By Luke Wright | Published: 24/04/2013

Delegates mingle in lineRecently I took part in the incredible experience that is Harvard WorldMUN. I came across the application while browsing the RMIT News feed and had no real idea of what it involved, but decided to jump in to try something new.

WorldMUN is an annual event, bringing together more than 2,000 university students from more than 80 countries to take part in model United Nations sessions, engaging, debating and working together to tackle the big global issues.

This was the first year it was hosted in Australia, and RMIT was one of the major hosts and sponsors. The conference reached new heights this year, being one of the few of its kind to be directly endorsed by the United Nations – launching youth engagement and global influence to a whole new level.
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Witnesses are forgetting clues to the Boston bombings … quickly

By Georgina Heydon | Published: 19/04/2013

Recording the small details as soon as possible is critical. Justin Lane/EPA

Memories, we know, are fallible, and in the case of acts such as this week’s horrific bombings in Boston, this presents particular problems. How can those charged with gathering eyewitness accounts – and those charged with giving them – be sure of what they’re hearing and saying? In a couple of words, they can’t.

Last night I tried to remember what I’d had for breakfast. A recollection of porridge and toast swam to the surface of my mind after a second or two, but now, less than 30 hours later, my memory is fading further – what did I have on my toast? – and I doubt I would remember anything even this specific if I hadn’t gone through the recall exercise last night.

Only a few hours separated my breakfast from the twin explosions in Boston. But similarly, witnesses to that terrifying event are already struggling to retrieve the details of their memories.

Critical evidence that might lead to the arrests and prosecution of the perpetrators is disappearing, even as you read this.

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Peter Corrigan: Embracing depth, complexity and passion

By Suzanne Davies | Published: 12/04/2013

Edmond and Corrigan, Building 8, RMIT University Swanston St, Melbourne, Vic., 1994. (Source: John Gollings)

In the writing of Australian cultural history, certainly the arts, the focus is fairly narrow: youth obsessed because youth presumably equates to “The New” and, as we like to tell ourselves, we are a young country (with a problematic relationship to history).

If at all possible, complexity is to be avoided. Complexity takes work and time to negotiate and often requires a depth of knowledge and lateral thought.

Charming one-liners are the preferred mode. And our awareness of history and the richness of the endeavors of those who preceded us are largely limited to a chosen few.

Generally, we are neither a confident nor adventurous nation when it comes to investing resources and recognising the achievements and value of culture, certainly not in the arts.

One of the privileges and responsibilities of a university gallery is to be free of the need to meet popular expectations. In these places we can challenge the familiar by critically engaging with complex imaginative creative practices. Most importantly, we can expand our historical awareness by exploding the canonical repertoire of who and what matters.

Bearing in mind the why, at RMIT Gallery we are intrigued by the creative achievements of all generations, locally and globally, especially where there are interdisciplinary and cross-cultural elements.

It was in this context that a conversation began some years ago in the gallery as to how and on whose work we might focus. Different exhibition formats have been developed. On occasion we explore a body of work from one visual artist or designer.

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Will I get the grant?

By Jonathan ODonnell | Published: 05/04/2013

After the heist (Jonathan O'Donnell on Flickr)

“Dear research whisperer,

Before I start thinking about my next grant, I just wanted to get your gut feeling for what you think is going to happen with the application that I put in this year. Any thoughts?”

Dear applicant

That is the hardest question that I face in my job, and one that I always resist answering. It comes in many forms: researchers want to know whether they will win the grant; administrators want to know whether they will meet targets; and bosses want to put hard numbers into workplans.

I know that some other research whisperers like to predict who will be successful and who won’t, but I don’t play that game. I like your application. I think that it is really strong. However, as Mark Bisby (former VP Research for the Canadian Institutes of Health Research) puts it, “It’s not a test, it’s a contest” (we love that quote). It doesn’t matter how strong your application is if the opposition is stronger. We have no control over the relative strength of the opposition.

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Uncivil and unbalanced: the Australian media can’t be trusted to report on industry reform

By Alexandra Wake | Published: 19/03/2013
News Limited’s Kim Williams

Media bosses such as News Limited’s Kim Williams have been ferocious in their attacks on proposed media reform. AAP/Lukas Coch

Anyone who has picked up the country’s biggest newspapers in the past week (and that of course includes the nation’s poll-fearing political powerbrokers) would naturally think communication minister Stephen Conroy’s apparently doomed media reforms presented a serious threat to Australia

In the past week the newspapers, lead by Sydney’s Daily Telegraph, have put Conroy on the side of Stalin and News Limited on the side of the angels (and, today, Thomas Jefferson). Fairfax has not been immune from demonising the reforms either.

As if the campaign on the front of the papers were not enough, the heads of Australia’s major media companies descended on Canberra yesterday to argue their case in parliament.

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