Articles

FRIENDSHIP

By Claire Cherrington

Friendship,
the meaning of which I do not know
Friendship,
its beginning and end I do not know

Its boundaries, its reaches are foreign to me,
Its languages, its people are all foreign to me.

Despite its depth and its mysteries,

I have searched high and low for friendship…
Meaningful to me, something I believe in and know

Found it I have not yet
Its meaning though in my mind, set.

This eternal search will end when I’ve forgotten
And once forgotten will return to…
Friendship,
The meaning of which I’m supposedly never meant to know
presence

What you were once
I am now,
As time goes by,
you become nothing
And as time goes by
I become everything
What you were once
I am now,
And forever it shall last
this very how.
In my lifetime at least,
I know.

Untitled

By Enoch Lau

The soft wind, tossing and turning,
Flows through our hair,
Sliding past our outstretched hands
As we stand at the crossroads of change.

We hold dearly onto those fragments of memory
That will forever bind us––
We came as strangers, yet
We leave as friends.

Despite the turbulences of this time,
The whirlpools, and the eddies of instability,
This is a time to set ourselves free,
A chance to uncover our eyes and see.

No matter where the tides of time will sweep us,
To the depths of misery
Or to the peaks of triumph,
We will always be together.

The Raw Deal

With a heavy clunk, the ticket barrier at Redfern station—separating the relatively safe sanctuary of the railway platforms from one of Sydney’s most notorious suburbs—opened up. This part of Redfern is particularly known for its unsociable residents; taking this into consideration, my parents had dispensed their customary keep-that-bag close-to-you oration earlier that morning. However, the only real challenge that presented itself was that you had to gasp an entire lungful of air and run the fifty-metre sprint in order to avoid the putrid smell wafting from the station toilets.

This overwhelming nasal experience served as a prelude to the last of day of the engineering summer school at the University of Sydney (a.k.a YESS). I had to navigate the horrendous jungles of skyscrapers and dense city blocks that make up the university, and as I turned the corner into the quadrangle… Wham! I became entangled into the seething mass of bodies that filled the small courtyard. The usual chilly silence had been replaced with remarkable loquaciousness, with anticipation rising sky-high for the all-important Egg-drop Competition.

This competition involved using the mind-boggling range of materials—polystyrene foam, a stingy amount of sticky tape, multicoloured cardboard, and something that looked like blue miniature briefs for Lilliputians—to deliver The Awe-Inspiring Egg safely from the fifth floor to ground level. We not only had to get the egg down without allowing Newton and his Laws of Gravity to stain the floor, but the winner would be the team that could deliver The Egg into the judges’ hands in the shortest possible time. It was a pity that it had to be delivered intact; otherwise, I might have succumbed to the tempting though to squish it as hard as possible into the hands of the malicious-looking judges.

The race was on. There were three in my team. I was from Sydney, but the other two were from out bush. One of them came from Orange, if I can remember correctly, and the other was from Albury-Wodonga, the town that has a small problem deciding in which state it wants to belong. Spread out across the neat grid of tables—there were about eight teams in all scattered around the room—were our rudimentary materials. Apparently, good engineers use whatever materials are at hand, but all it showed was that the university was rather mean.

People began to scurry like rats in and out of the room, and along the fire staircase to reach the drop zone. Industrial espionage was at a level not seen since the Cold War with ‘friends’ coming over to chat – with half an eye on our invention. Naturally, of course, my team did likewise.

By this point, at least ten completely different designs had been conceived. My proud contribution included the parachute type contraption I made from the blue Lilliputian briefs. Blue and still looking like underwear, the basic idea was to attach it to the casing surrounding The Egg with the rubber bands we extracted from the fabric – it really was underwear…

However, it was to be outdone by The Capsule. Borne out of material we scavenged from the table behind and to the left of us – the people who owned it were outside busy testing their hopeless contrivance – it basically was a blue egg carton with twenty centimetre thick walls. Any initial scepticism was eliminated after the test runs went as smoothly as the first Apollo missions did. We just hoped that we would not replicate the results for the thirteenth of the aforementioned missions.

With only half an hour to go, morning tea break was disastrous. People were eating pieces of uncooked egg that had stuck to their hands, along with their biscuits; trembling hands sent cups of lemon-lime cordial spilling over the balcony – of course, hitting the floor right on target. After mixing with the remnants of the Apollo 13s of the Egg-drop Competition, the results truly resembled something resembling diarrhoea.

I have never realised the powerful psychological and physiological effects of the magical words “Time up!” As it was called out, a pair of scissors could be seen flying across the room, nearly mutilating the sensitive privates of a student supervisor. Now, the rules stipulated that the egg had to touch the target zone, and then be hand-delivered by someone to one of the judges. I just happened to be that person. Yes, I did go to the toilet during morning tea break…

“Number 7!” called the timekeeper. Why did we have to be the first team, the guinea pigs put there callously so that the others could feel just that more confident? Straining my neck to the limit, I swung my head upwards. I still wonder how the guy from Albury-Wodonga could be so carefree as to walk over to the balcony and drop it without looking. Graciously, The Capsule navigated precisely through the narrow beams that criss-crossed in its path. These were there, presumably, to hold the building up; it seemed more like an obstacle course. As it progressively expanded in my field of vision, I could see something else expanding with it. It was the opening in the base of The Capsule, and even though it was held firmly together with sticky tape, masking tape and pure luck, the inevitable occurred.

Splat! If I knew that it was going to feel like diarrhoea as well as looking like diarrhoea, then I might have let it hit the ground instead. The Egg had failed to miss my hands – undeniably sticky, but thankfully not blue. Afterwards, we went through the communal tear-shedding session, a kind of catharsis, a purgation of the emotions. As the winning contraption was hoisted into the air amidst raucous applause, I saw that there was something on the top of it, held on with rubber bands—it was blue, and looked remarkably like underwear.

Those pricks had pinched that off me.