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If you’re reading this, chances are that you’re an Otago student (or else have a taste for cutting-edge journalism), but does that automatically make you a scarfie? It seems that fewer and fewer students self-identify as scarfies, thinking of scarfies as unfocused pissheads who don’t care about getting an education. What the hell happened? “Scarfie” was meant to include everyone, alt or jock, BA or BCom, Hawkes Bay or Hamilton. Scarfie was an inclusive term. But is it now just the rugby-playing, beer-swilling, Castle Street riot-provoking meatheads who qualify as scarfies? Or are we all still scarfies at heart? Joe Stockman hits the streets of North D and examines scarfie identity in the year twenty eleven.

The Glory Days
Beer was cheap, couches were flammable, and Otago rugby was beating all comers. The early 1990s was the heyday of the scarfie, so named after the fluttering blue and gold scarfs packing the terraces as students braved the weather to support Otago. There were only 11,000 students then, compared to this year’s role of over 22,000. And they lived, much as we do now, around the North Dunedin in flats and student halls. It was a simpler time; no dub-step or puffer jackets; no Code of Conduct or fire bans; surfing was cool and skating was not; Gardies, the Bowler and KC’s still rocked the night away, and if you wanted Asian food for dinner Mei Wah’s and Golden Sun were your two options.
 
Nowadays, well, Dunedin’s gone all corporate. Aucklanders bought down their café culture and Wellingtonians bought down their dub. The University dreamt up Campus Watch and the COC, while students killed their own bars by doing all their drinking at home. And the media, don’t get me started on the fucking media. Sensationalist trumped-up bullshit about scarfies out of control on Castle Street ruined the good reputation of the 20,000 students who were out having a good old time without bottling any police officers at all.
 
See, look, you got me started
This was going to be journalism of the highest calibre. I was going to blow you all away with my diction and mastery of the English language, my ability to find interesting information and weave it into a refined, yet complex and entertaining narrative. Instead I present to you a rant entitled “fuck the ODT”.
 
I’ve had it up to here with that rag, that sensationalist adult diaper of a newspaper. Quit destroying what is beautiful to entertain your geriatric readership. They will forget everything they’ve read by midday anyway. Just tell them about the fucking calf that won the blue ribbon at pet day, move on to the hurling results from 1973 and round it all with a nice cup of tea and a cryptic quiz written by a 93-year old with intense dementia (told you I’d mention you Grandma, you owe me twenty bucks).
 
The ODT and, to turn a Sarah Palin phrase, the rest of the ‘Lame Stream Media’ (she said lame instead of main…get it?) have sensationalised the shit out of student behaviour. Instead of the reality of harmlessly burning a few old tattered couches over a beer with mates, they make it sound like students were bbqing Picassos and drinking the blood of the year sevens at Logan Park.
 
We students are young, we’re boisterous, we’re finding our limits and testing the water. And yeah, some of us like to burn some stuff now and then. But you try living in those flats, they’re fucking freezing. If it were that cold in your house you’d be burning shit too. The ODT makes it sound like helpless victims lay strewn on the streets following these ‘student outrages’. But who are the victims in all of this student violence, this out of control rampage of unsupervised youth? Landlords? Hell no, they have bonds, and airtight contracts. The citizens of Dunedin? No, they live in the high veldt aristocracy of Maori Hill or the suburban squalor of South D. If anyone is the victim of student misbehaviour it is the students themselves, and they don’t seem to be complaining.
 
The media’s insistence on out of proportion and out of context reporting has destroyed the value of the Otago experience; they blamed ‘students’ as a whole for the toga parade debacle, instead of blaming ‘dumb fucks that like to throw their own faeces’. They cast the Castle Street riots as booze-fuelled student hooliganism, instead of as a massive overreaction by Dunedin police. Students don’t even want to call themselves scarfies anymore because the media has turned the word into something ugly. Thanks a fucking lot ODT.
 
One of NZ’s most famous scarfies, double international and TV celebrity Marc Ellis remembers the beauty of the Otago experience as being its inclusiveness of so many different people from so many different backgrounds, coming together for the shared experience of being a scarfie. “It didn’t matter where you were from or what you studied…the goth or emo kid who was all alone at high school could come down to Otago and go to Clubs and Socs and find other people just like him.” Even for Ellis, the notorious lad about town, the Otago experience was about a lot more than just getting pissed and playing rugby.
 
The Death Knell
Don’t believe the hype people. Being a scarfie is about everything that is great about the Otago experience, and has nothing to do with the minority meatheads who want to throw poo and start riots. The University has, either deliberately or through a gradual process, worked to devalue the scarfie identity. The powers-that-be were forced to react to the overwhelmingly negative media coverage of the actions of a few, but they did not need to target all scarfies and make the scarfie identity appear wholly negative.
 
Universities are no longer houses of higher learning and culture; they are temples to the almighty dollar. The uni knows that a substantial proportion of us are taking on huge debt to finance degrees we don’t need and will never be able to use. They do so with a smile on their face because they need our money. They don’t want you here, but they need you here to finance the things that they actually want to be doing. So they gentrify the student village, they control and dictate what acceptable behaviour is, they sanitise Castle Street by buying up flats to fill with international students (nothing against you guys). And they do it all to protect their brand from inflammatory media attacks on scarfieness.

Student culture is under attack, people. You chose to come to Otago because you wanted something different (or because via a quirk of fate you were born in Dunedin, sorry about that). You wanted to not only get an education but to gain experiences that you couldn’t get anywhere else. But soon Otago will just be another university degree machine with nothing different from Auckland or Victoria. You’d be better off staying at Mum and Dad’s and saving your pennies to pay off your loan.
 
Save a scarfie
Of course, you don’t have to be a scarfie. University is about challenging who you are and who you want to be. A big part of that is comparing yourself to your peers and thinking about who you want to be like, who you want to be with. But don’t be elitist about it. Maybe “scarfie” means something different now, maybe it is about people who drink more than the norm, party more than the norm, play sport more than the norm. But variety is the spice and flavour of life, and if you don’t want to be exposed to variety then university probably isn’t the place for you.
 
For me, being a scarfie is about breaking away from what you knew and coming down to Otago to find something out about yourself. It’s about freezing flats and dirty dishes, red cards and BYOs, Hyde Street and toga parties, nights out and walks of shame, studying hard and partying harder. We don’t need to overdefine being a Scarfie; there are 22,000 different ways to be an Otago student. But if it’s about one thing, it’s about your mates; learning with, drinking with, and living with your mates in a way that you can’t do anywhere else in NZ.
 
So be a scarfie, don’t be a scarfie, it’s all up to you. But don’t reject 142 years of tradition out of hand. When you’re done here and looking back on your time at Otago, I hope you think of yourself as part of a long and changing scarfie tradition.