Welcome to Salient. This issue is your handy guide to the goings on of Orientation 2009. From next week onwards Salient is your one stop shop for news and information about the happenings around campus. We’re distributed every Monday during term time and we update our website (www.Salient.org.nz) during the week and holidays.
We’re funded by the $130 or so dollars you gave to the Victoria University of Wellington Students’ Association (VUWSA, or Voo-sa). About $7 of that goes directly into the Salient budget. So this is your magazine. If you don’t like what I am doing as Editor, write a letter to letters@Salient.org.nz. If you want to write for Salient, which I thoroughly encourage, drop into the office. We’re on level two of the Student Union Building. This whole issue is a big “kia ora” to the next three or four years of many of our lives. So much emphasis is put on this “new beginning” that sometimes we forget what we’re ka kite’ing. Those carefree days of mooching off your parents will be few and far between. The innocence of youth will be cast off like a damp camelhair rug and left slightly soiled in the gutter of Courtney Place. Many of you will be saying goodbye to your hometowns. In six months’ time you will speak of with cheerful derision. Remember where you came from. The rivers you’ve you waded in and the hills you’ve climbed.
Wellington will pull you four ways. Anonymity is assured to those who seek it, but most of you will create a rich network of friends, acquaintances and enemies. This will nurture the second pull of cultural immersion. Wellington is New Zealand’s art capital. You can go to a different exhibition, show, film, play or gig pretty much every night. Third pull is the proximity of political power. Weird electromagnetic waves emanate from the Beehive, warping otherwise sane minds. The last pull is that you can actually find yourself within the menacing ridgelines of Wellington. Walk down Cuba Mall barefoot. Watch question time in a suit. Study. Sleep. Drink. Grow.