University Avenue was recently invaded by a flying dragon, a giant green bear, and an enormous redback spider – but the lunchtime crowd weren’t perturbed.
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| The redback spider is the symbol of Burton and Garran Hall. |
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These oversized creatures were just some of the decorated parade sticks on display during the inaugural ANU Autumn Festival held on 4 May.
Hundreds of staff and students took part in the event, which included a parade of symbolic standards featuring groups from all sectors of the campus.
Student piper Sean Hodgman led the representatives from academic and general departments, social groups, sporting clubs, and childcare centres to a stage at the western end of University Avenue, where three judges selected the best creation.
Burton and Garran Hall won the $500 prize for its giant redback, which Residents’ Association President Kristy Williams described as an embodiment of community spirit.
“At Burton and Garran we’ve got an awesome sense of community, so when we heard the idea that ANU would hold a festival to support every diverse community we got involved.”
Ms Williams said quite apart from her team’s parade win, the first Autumn Festival could be deemed a success for the entire University.
“Autumn is always the most beautiful season at ANU. That’s one of the reasons I enjoy being a student here: to walk through the University Avenue every day.”
The Autumn Festival was an initiative of the Office of the Pro-Vice Chancellor (University Community), Professor Penny Oakes.
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Professor Penny Oakes plants a memorial tree. |
“It was really heartening to see so many people connected to the University, from the very youngest to the more seasoned, taking part in our first Autumn Festival. The parade was a smashing success, and was displayed to great effect under the beautiful avenue of trees along University Avenue,” Professor Oakes said.
“The organising committee is extremely grateful to those who contributed to the spirit of the event, including the musicians from Scuna and Drumatix, our revered judges Bronwyn Evans, Alastair Greig and Aparna Rao, and the skillful compering team of Peter Fyfe and Tim Mayfield. I think that it’s only going to get bigger and better each year. I’m especially pleased that the first event will be remembered forever through the wonderful poem by Mark O’Connor that we commissioned for the day.”
Mr O’Connor, who was an H.C. Coombs Creative Fellow in 1999 and the official poet for the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000, said the event evoked memories of his own time at ANU.
“I’ve lived on campus. I love Canberra to live in, especially in autumn. It’s an autumn city,” he said.
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| Particpants in the autumn parade. |
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“You look out through the windows of the art gallery, where we’ve supposedly enclosed true beauty indoors, and outside are nature’s own coloured abstracts, which put Leonard French’s artworks to shame.”
The autumn poem (read at the festival and reproduced below) incorporated many references to ANU, including the striking mural and paintings by Leonard French that hang in the Hall at University House.
The Autumn Festival culminated in the planting of a crepe myrtle near the Physics Building, with plans to develop a grove of trees at the site during subsequent years. Participants also enjoyed a range of international foods from stalls along University Avenue.
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| Mark O'Connor reads his autumn poem. |
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Autumn in Acton
By Mark O’Connor
Color in numbness, now the green’s gone
The leaf’s chill grandeur blazes free
With the construction crew withdrawn
Till next Spring’s sprung, what’s left above
Contracts and cracks, abscissing to the Fall;
Trees are fractal glories; and the sap-starved leaves
Reveal their crimson scaffolds, floating gold cloths.
Flung profligately down on lawns, they yaw and veer
to soft-land among an unseeing crowd,
That miss the moment, as they dash to lectures.
Here March and April wear two faces: Autumn
The harvest-market when the town’s suburbs
Become communes, trading tomatoes for basil,
Quince for feijoa; and Fall, terminal season
Of retreating life, as the land exhales a cow-breath sigh
And turns to its cold sleep.
The sun’s fusion furnace is banked down,
Less sunburn than a healthful oblique glow
Still potent at 700 metres in this once-treeless town,
Last and lowest of the Snowy’s frost-hollows.
Bees are still drunk with the smell of fallen fruits;
Coarse grass of neighbouring vineyards
Is stained by the blood of the grape;
But river swimming stopped in O-Week.
Soon it’s Easter when the Gallery’s mullioned windows
Are mocked by what’s outside.
Nature’s quasi-religious abstracts
Put Leonard French to shame.
April, and the currawong’s graceless clang
Is the frosty time made audible,
Exuberant, as these top predators play
Big fish in our little valley, doing their victory rolls,
Safe from their predator that hates frost.
Season of fructose gladness, its sugars mixed
With melancholy for declining life and year.
Now the year turns downwards to the compost tip
Where each of us is bound, to winter’s penance and to Spring.
In this time of cold
Now life draws in, but banks its fires higher.
May is
Calm days when you can half smell
A car’s exhaust, minutes since it left your street.
Each breath that stirs
Is some leaf’s death;
Yet there must come a few
Windy harridans of days to beat down the last torn leaves
And slip the sideways sun into the valley,
stripped of its shadecloth that kept summer cool.
Rosellas with their sideways treadle-ing claws
Move transverse up the sprays of pyrocanthus
Feast on golden berries in a slow exultant dance.
But for students in the Acton antipodes the autumn is springtime,
When migrating flocks settle in to fresh campus groves
The newcomers mating and bonding, to raucous musical grunts
And thumps that threaten the ancient roof-ridges
Give their elders the fidgets
Et gaudeamus igit-
Ur! In this Academe spring of new units with scarce an exam in sight,
Time when the teachers cut just a little slack,
As they unfold ancient wisdoms
For the briefly young in that old community
Whose anthem is “juvenes dum sumus”
And aims to chart our human humus.
There’s time to walk out in the lukewarm dusk, and see in Sullivan’s estuary
Pairs of the silver-fleeced water-rat playing, a rodent becoming an otter;
Time to trace the old willowed course of the Creek, clear through library walls;
A last time for the tropical-born to learn all the trees and colors of coldness,
Of this “town where they keep the European seasons”,
Time to glimpse, between classes, a less crowded kinder world
Than political science dares hope, as we dash for 8 billion,
That tight bottleneck for all other riders on Earth.
An autumn time for ideals, hopes, clubs, bushwalking, loves ...
Soon, soon, comes the first frost of continuous assessment
That killed student drama,
And, later, the springtime panic, true Fall of the year
--Well for those who have made their bed deep and warm by then!
When that kapok of worry, the cottonwood’s snow, lies deep on the campus,
Presaging that image of death and harvest in one,
Termination and triumph, the final exam.
Soon frosts will crispen till the last leaves crash
Tinkling on the frozen earth. But for me
Autumn is a white cockatoo, with pale crest of lemon,
perched in a poplar of burning gold in May;
and the dawn mist wisping up like smoke.
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