“I ended up [REDACTED]”.

The curly-haired boy looks at me over his flask on the table, at the perimeter of the bar outside the Big Theatre Company. This is the no-man’s-land seating area between the civilised tables of TV executives and mainstage subscribers, and the eucalyptus trees set in brutalist concrete. This little green corner of Southbank, that middle suburb of Melbourne existing between space and time and reality, is the place where my dreams started coming true. It’s where I loved arts, it’s where I made friends, it’s where I discovered cruelty. The place I learned to get at least 3 references from female artists before casting a male one.

“That really sucks”.

This boy is real as hell. I found him on The Apps. I messaged him “come to my grad show” and sent him my instagram. He did come - it was three hours long, a medley of student theatre on a ridiculously expensive set. Drama school. I was only in it for half an hour.

I’ve just lost my job, I’ve just finished my first ever theatre gig at the company I’ve dreamed of working at since forever, and I am about to graduate. Half of my relationships with the other students in my cohort have been tangled, broken, or abandoned over these three years. Soon we will have grad drinks, then graduation - my cohort uneasily placed side by side for the last time, the sixteen remaining shards of an online application portal from three years ago.

The boy walks me to the tram stop. When it arrives, I invite him to come with me. We sit on my bed in St Kilda East, and when I look at my phone again, it’s three hours later.

The next day, my doctor tells me I have viral tonsillitis. I text him - he responds “#worthit.”

The struggle for power at VCA, just below the surface of upper-middle-class niceties, blotted out the sun. We weren’t just cunts / mean girls to each other in search of power (to be fair, we all played that out once or twice), but it was more that everything else came second to one’s proximity for greatness at any given moment.

We were all painfully aware that most of us would not have a sustainable career in the arts. Whoever was the most aligned with that pathway had the god-given halo of The Industry (via callback / email / “networking” / etc.). They were someone to be discussed, envied, feared, befriended, and potentially destroyed on the game’s next turn. Those beautiful moments of collaboration, love, open critique between true and loving friends - those moments felt like breaths of fresh air because they so often were. An archipelago of islands in an ocean of struggle between a hundred twenty-somethings for their right to claim the throne of Success, or the far more treacherous Potential.

We frequently played the act of “rejecting” VCA. “This place is shit”, “the old lecturers were way better”, “they’re just not investing in us correctly”, etc. were commonplace. To complain, of course, implied that you were aware of and intimately familiar with a more “correct” artistic space: a different rehearsal room, an esteemed artist, a senior student’s rumours - thus elevating your proximity to power. If you truly rejected VCA, you would stop coming to classes, you’d drop out of university, and the game of rejection would end. No social capital for you. The opposite is true: if you were someone who questioned the underlying principles beyond a cursory remark, if you really dug into “why does everyone have rich parents?” or “why are there so few Blak people here?”, you threatened the status of the majority of people involved with the conversation (myself included). Even if they were happy to listen and engage, you still lost the game of complaining because you couldn’t be one-upped. The goal was to play, to win was unforgivable.

“I don’t want to share anything”.

The head of the course looks up at me from across the pronoun circle.

“What?”

We have the exact same hair.

“I said - I don’t want to share anything. This has not been fun. So, um. I didn’t prepare anything. So I, I don’t want to share anything”.

I am speaking to an audience of my peers, arranged in a silent circle, nestled in a freezing arts festival hall in Queenstown, Lutruwita. We are the fourteen surviving members of the Bachelor Of Fine Arts program that have made it to their third and final year, and the benevolent university has gifted us an all-expenses-paid trip to a Regional Community where we shall Engage. We are Third Years, we are artists, we have been plucked out of the safe haven of Southbank classrooms and thrown into the strip-mining mountains of Tasmania’s east coast. There’s an arts festival here every two years, and we’re not here during the arts festival, but we didn’t know that before we arrived.

We all kind of know how much money this trip must’ve cost. We know how incredible it is to be in a place where our education is invested in like this. But we feel - we feel the squabbles that we’ve brought with us more than anything. We cry in the hostel, we listen to each other cry in the hostel from our little rooms - by this point we are well-trained in both vocal projection and acting as a receptive / hostage audience.p>

“That’s okay. There’s no pressure to contribute anything”.

A guy yelled at me from a car on the main street of this town. I drank dry apple cider and stayed in bed. Lutruwita is one of the most beautiful places I have ever been. Mountains like the moon, acid rain, lakes like a Minecraft terrain generation mod.

In the hostel the night before, everyone gathered in a circle by the washing machines. One cis girl said guys, guys, guys. what if we don’t share anything, like, in honour of Bri. Because she’s had such a hard time like what if in the circle we all don’t share anything as a show of support! Everyone shared something, including her. Because of course she did.

And just for a second, I’m back at a Southbank party at the start of second year, when everyone swore up and down that they would join me in making a complaint. When I messaged them a week later, every person found a reason they couldn’t go through with it.

We are doing “tragedy project.” A time honoured-tradition, always at the end of the first semester of second year. We are performing a devised retelling of Kong Shang-Ren’s “The Peach Blossom Fan”, an 18th-century Chinese drama detailing the fall of the Ming Dynasty. It’s closing night, and four work friends are in the audience. At the end of the show, I stand up. I’m wearing a cheap princess peach costume over a rit-dyed pink singlet and red cotton shorts, meant to represent “Fragrant Princess Peach” - a combination of the heroine of the Peach Blossom Fan and that famous pink Nintendo woman. I feel the anger, really, truly feel it this time, even though after a year at drama school I still feel I can barely apply acting technique to my work. A classmate flies around in a projected playthrough of a minecraft world I built when I was 13 they ported to their computer, and I perform the piece’s final monologue.

“My name is [REDA], NB, 18. The apocalypse will happen soon. We all know this. When it does, I’ll make a new home, in a subtropical mangrove swamp with flowers and stingrays. I will grow purple climbing beans, potatoes, and peas. I will have time to put them in the proper wire trellis. When I venture back to the city for supplies, I’ll walk through abandoned libraries, cathedrals, train stations, and open every locked door. I’ll steal all of their toilet paper and hand sanitizer. I’ll throw water balloons from the balcony on the seventh floor of David Jones. I would paint every wide-open space with all the faces I remember. I would cover the steps of the state library with the face of the boy who played Chad in a junior production of High School Musical that made me realise that I really did like boys. The shading wouldn’t have to be perfect. I’ll swim in the rivers. I’ll have pot-luck dinners with the other survivors. One of the other survivors will have brown eyes and a moustache. He’ll teach me how to fish, I’ll teach him how to grow plants. We’ll visit groves of blossoming vines and overgrown canola fields and we’d swim in the ocean and remember how small we are. My body will change with the seasons and with my life and it’ll be okay. I’ll make friends with all the parrots the way my dad showed me. I’ll invent a new language without pronouns. I’ll welcome travellers into my home, and learn about their lives, and tell them about mine. I will have the time to know every person I meet. One day a child will be left in the swamp. We’ll raise this child, and let them play in the swamp. I’ll tell them all the stories of my life, knowing full well that they’ll make the same mistakes. One day they’ll go off into the world, and now it’s just me and moustache man again. But travellers will always stop in my swamp for some mushroom tea and a bowl of peas.”

Steve flies out in the Minecraft world behind me, to reveal the words “THE PEACH BLOSSOM FAN” built out of glowstone on the 1.10 minecraft mountain cliff face. Everyone turns to look.

The boys at VCA.

The boys at VCA are who you warn each other about.

The boys at VCA are the ones you hold at arm’s length, because even if they’re sweet today, any kind of allegation could come out tomorrow. A whispered account from a sweet first-year who looks twelve years old and reminds you of your cousin, or your kindy buddy in year six.

The boys at VCA rarely find work in the industry.

The boys at VCA don’t survive in an environment where women talk to each other. But the boys at VCA, during the three years of being held by the big institution where the lecturers are too busy and the students too scared to speak up, to properly speak up, enjoy three years of being held, excused, of being given permission and second chances.

The boys at VCA know exactly how to sit in the no-man’s-land of pushing one girl’s boundaries, on the blurred line of driving you specifically insane. The boys at VCA know how to make you an unjustified bitch. The boys at VCA are passionate about experimental performance.

The boys at VCA are all on hinge.

The boys at VCA are your friends.

The boys at VCA mean that when someone asks you about your time at university, you’ll go um yeah well it was interesting.

The boys at VCA are learning, the boys at VCA are growing.

Do we know where the boys at VCA go once they leave?

I think about this a lot.

Because it’s not film sets, and it’s not mainstages.

Are they teaching classes?

Are they managing department stores?

What will they do with everything they learnt at VCA?

Who do they do it to?

And cause of the boys at VCA, the things you learnt, the art you created, and the loved ones you met will never be the crux of any story about your time at VCA.

On my first day in Melbourne, I posted three stories on my private instagram account, giving a tour of my new room. I was seventeen.

“Okay: room tour!

So, look at my view. That’s the skyline of Melbourne!

You can’t really tell but it’s cool - Anyway!

Desk, mask, got all my little skincare products,

Got my little froggies - dad managed to put thomas back together so that’s

cool, got my quilt, no pillows, still have to buy pillows!

Uh, got my little bag, and a cupboard!

Um, got my shoes down there, little mirror, heyyyy!

Uh, okay, and then that’s my roommate’s room, who hasn’t shown up…

Yet! They still got time.

This - fridge, need to fit all my cooking shit in there.

Bathroom -

I live hereeeeeee !!!”