Everywhere on earth, places with a high concentration of people who take themselves seriously emit a particular kind of toxicity. Melbourne Uni is like a toxic dump. An aesthetically pleasing kind of dump, it must be said, buttressed by history and, of course, extra rich in the success stories of its graduates. It is not Cambridge or Columbia, but graduating from it has not hurt anyone yet.
 
In my considerable naivety, I thought that at least in the beginning all new students would feel equally out of their element, that for most of us the first year would be like a large fire, in which our old ways of doing and being would swiftly turn to ash. The place around me, however, is a triumph of the familiar. So many people, it seems, have managed to bypass completely the conflagration I imagined as a kind of compulsory initiation rite, smuggling in their entire friendship circles, their arrogance and their parents’ connections, their social know-how and ideological grooming. No wonder the university so often looks like a logical extension of their pub crawls and dinner parties, their school debating societies and student newspapers. They have not been here before but it is unmistakably their place. And therefore, never, not for a moment, mine.
 
University life in the early 1990s, the little fragment I get to see, seems to me starkly devoid of real friction, of the punch and the slap, to say nothing of a feverish insomnia that the right kind of learning and thinking should have no difficulty inducing. The university’s pockets of disquiet—a sexual harassment suit here, a student protest there—only strengthen my overall impression of a well-oiled, well-managed mechanism. Sometimes, as I walk past the lush, silky lawns where undergraduates recline at all hours of the day, my surroundings feel like a sanatorium, a place that propels one towards being, in the yet to be uttered words of John Howard, ‘relaxed and comfortable’. Where are all the tense and uncomfortable people? remains an unanswered question in my first few years at the university, during which I make no real, or even imagined, friends.
 
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