Monash Open Day

On Friday evening we hired the complete series of We Can Be Heroes on DVD, and ended up watching all episodes in one sitting. Brilliant. Nathan and Daniel remain my favourite characters, but Ricky Wong's up there too. Ricky's most poignant scene occurs when he's dismayed by the limited opportunities open for Asian actors in Australia - "Sometimes I forget that I'm Chinese" he says. Ricky feels so 'Australian' that he overlooks his Chinese background, and it's only when confronted with the cultural construction of white Australia that he remembers he's an outsider, still somehow locked out of Australianness by hidden cultural forces. In this sense, there's nothing absurd about a young Asian university student performing the role of an Aborigine in a theatre production. In fact, it makes total sense. At one point Ricky says the Chinese can identify with Aborigines, because both share very old cultures - but there's more to the connection than just that - there's the exclusion they share from the cultural production of Australianness. Went to Monash University Open Day this morning. Attended an information session on teaching, which was, yeah, kinda interesting. Afterwards, the audience were told that staff would be on-hand to answer questions in another building. We headed straight there, and found ourselves in a queue. Half an hour later, we were still in the queue. The Grad. Dip. Ed. queue was trailing out the door, and there were only two staff members there to answer questions. Meanwhile, the undergrad Bachelor of Education queue never had more than 3 people, and there were 7 tables set up for questions. I took on my mature-age-student role, and complained to someone, who quickly got the postgrad queue moving along. Anyway, the woman I spoke to about my plans made me feel like I was following a rather difficult path. She implied that there are so few Dip. Ed. places for History majors that it was almost impossible to get into, whilst the most feasible option is to combine anything with English, because there is always a demand for English teachers. I don't have the prerequisite subjects under my belt to get into an English Dip. Ed. stream, and I have no great desire to be an English teacher. So the whole experience left me feeling dismayed. Still, I plan to attend other Open Days over the next few weeks, so we'll see where they take me.