STUDENT
STUDENT Rising out of Chaos by Kate Mani Illustration by Carina Florea A flashback to our former self. Chaos. In the week leading up to a Lot’s <strong>Wife</strong> printing deadline it may seem like the paper’s middle name. Well, not all that long ago it was. Undoubtedly the greatest keeper of Lot’s <strong>Wife</strong> stories is past Monash student, Pete Steedman. A former federal parliamentary member for Casey and Executive Director of not-for-profit company Ausmusic, Steedman reported for, edited and revolutionised both Lot’s <strong>Wife</strong> and its predecessor, Chaos, during his time at Monash. “Monash had this incredible reputation of being radical,” he says. “When you sum it down…the only thing radical was what was coming out of Lot’s <strong>Wife</strong>!” The revolutionary nature of Monash student press reflected the environment into which it was born. Monash University was founded in 1958, the only new university at that time to ‘start up from scratch’, not evolving from a pre-existing TAFE or college. “That’s what makes [Monash] so unique,” Steedman says. “There was no peer group, no establishment, no ground rules, no laws, just fucking mud everywhere. You didn’t have anybody to lead you into university or explain anything, you created everything on the spot.” The paper students created was truly their own. During O-Week in 1962, a bold tabloid hit the Monash campus, Chaos. A world away from today’s glossy magazine, Chaos was first and foremost a newspaper. Highly political and controversial, Steedman recollects writing articles “attacking the coppers, attacking the university, attacking everybody.” Covering contemporary social issues from police brutality to the existence of God, Chaos was known for doing its research. “Chaos didn’t act as propaganda, it showed all sides of an argument,” Steedman says. Its capacity to generate debate and therefore influence students is what Steedman believes made it dangerous, as people were able to learn from it, trust it and adopt new ideas. In 1964 the paper was edited by a new team including Emeritus Professor Ross Fitzgerald, now an Australian academic, historian, writer and political commentator. The group “decided they were going to be…revolutionary” and the blank spaces where articles should have appeared in editions of their paper are a testament to this. “Because the printers wouldn’t publish some of their bullshit they left spaces and then published the articles in separate sheets,” Steedman says. It wouldn’t be the first time that the printers of The Age, who printed Chaos and then Lot’s <strong>Wife</strong>, acted as a censor on student press. Further restrictions by this conservative printer in 1965 saw the editing team search for another company and discover a small printer in Waverley. This was one of the first printing presses in Victoria to use offset printing, then a modern technique whereby inked images were transferred (or “offset”) from a metal plate to a rubber blanket and pressed onto the printing surface. Always ahead of its game, in 1965 Monash also boasted the first colour student newspaper in Australia. Steedman was never put off by the university’s attempts to censor him. “I didn’t cop that [censorship],” he says. “I asked the uni what are you going to do about it?” But Lot’s <strong>Wife</strong> | 7