Content warning: Contains reference to sexual assault and animal abuse
Castle Street has a way of making legends out of flats. Some burn bright, some burn out, and some burn couches. Big Red has done all three. The fifteen-man flat is as notorious as the street it stands on. They are the Breatha Castle, and their Monday ‘Red-Out’ host rivals even the biggest weekend turnouts of O-week parties.
But it was this year’s ‘Red-Out’ where the struggle for control over Castle Street – between the authorities and the student body – came to a head. When I went to interview the boys in Big Red, they’d just been stripped of their ability to host for the first time in decades. Castle may be known as the heart of the ‘City Run by Students’ (as one viral video termed it); but there’s little doubt the street is now a shell of its former self.
While previous students spent their university years dancing around burning couches and guzzling beer ‘til the sun rose, our nights end at twelve. Non-negotiable. CCTV cameras are fixed to power poles, surveilled around the clock by Campus Watch, whose on-the-ground teams prowl at every corner. They’ll joke and jive, asking students where they’re off to after dark with a knowing laugh, before offering a “have fun, stay safe,” that might also be read as “I’m not your enemy.” The trade-off for this friendly exchange? Heads now peek out of drawn curtains, anxiously glancing both ways down Castle for the threat of hi-vis, before exhaling a puff from a bong. Sure, it’s illegal. But it’s also a world away from the privacy our parents were afforded in their own homes to do the same (even if they deny it).
A decade of increased surveillance, court cases, and University crackdowns came to a head two weeks ago with Big Red’s non-host. This is the story of how we got there.
11am: Knock, Knock, it’s the Proctor
I was originally tasked with interviewing and filming a ‘behind the scenes’ feature on Big Red to emphasise how much work goes into throwing an Orientation Week host. From scaffolding, to lights, smoke cannons and fireworks, each flat’s reputation is on the line to throw a rager, raking up costs up to $10k for the night. At 11am, I arrived at the red-brick complex – against the wishes of the boys, who’d messaged Critic minutes earlier from their flat instagram @bigreddih to cancel the interview: “Proctor’s already on our ass, so ceebs.” The neighbour’s landlord had refused the boys use of their shared driveway for the host, and so they were forced to cancel**.
Birkenstocked boys scurried in and out of the building like ants, carrying odd items – a mini TV, a box of clothes hangers, and a vape passed from hand to hand. As it turns out, the entire flat group were moving in the same day as they were scheduled to host. Surely it’d be less stressful if they gave themselves more time to get settled in, I thought, but I didn’t bother asking why they didn’t move down to Dunedin after O-Week. They would have laughed.
The boys were apologetic about having to cancel the interview. It was obvious that everything had gone to shit. Half of them pile into a car for a trip to Mitre10. A friend from The Hedge flat offers sympathetically, “Need some money for the spray paint?” It's a wholesome display of breathaffection. Big Red are scrambling. They still don’t have a location to host at, mere hours away from the party beginning.
The flat had been warned earlier not to go ahead with the host, but they didn’t take the warning seriously it seems. It’s their private property, after all – who are they to be told what to do? What’s O-Week without the iconic ‘Red-Out’? It’s unclear why the boys suddenly decided to heed the warning today. Resident Finlay* is very gracious in speaking to Critic, but it’s clear he is not the mastermind of Big Red’s hosting operation. He picked his own name, presumably because this interview embarasses him.
Critic: So what’s going on?
Finlay: Oh, we’re just not allowed to host here.
Critic: Is that because of the Proctor, or the landlord or…?
Finlay: Um, I think – we don’t really know.
Critic: But you knew a week ago [you weren’t allowed to host], right?
Finlay: Yeah.
Critic: Did someone come in today and warn that you’re really not allowed to do this?
Finlay: I don’t know. It’s all a bit confusing.
How Big Red’s host got shut down is a much longer and more confusing story than just that morning, or even the weeks prior. It traces all the way back to 2009 and two words: Undie 500.
The Undie 500 (read: “undie-five-hundy”) was a hitch-hiking style race that ran from 1988 to 2009, in which Canterbury engineering students would buy a car for less than $500, decorate it as everything from a lego brick to the Jamaican flag, and pub crawl their way from Christchurch to Castle Street. The event became a legendary part of Otago student culture. These days were the peak of couch burning, binge drinking crates of Speight’s, and massive open-host parties. On Saturday, 12th September 2009, all of these student antics collided in what became the third and final Castle Street riot. Students fended off police batons, while police were pelted with bottles, bricks, and bicycle parts. Fires burned on the road. Cars were flipped over. 80 arrests were made in a single night.
Castle Street unruliness had reached its peak, and the University wanted to intervene. By this point, the Student Code of Conduct had been in force for two years, a by-law that allows the Proctor to sentence students to community service, suspension, and expulsion over specific activities, like couch burning and initiations, not easily captured under the law. Couch burning and initiations were, of course, close-held traditions to Big Red, who last year, in lieu of being able to burn a couch, constructed a multi-level ‘couch stadium’ (exactly what it sounds like). Notably, the boys were forced to take it down to make way for fencing that now divides the flats. One resident even speculated it was part of a plan to “kill student culture, and without the culture, Dunedin is just a shit Palmerston North.”
Although students couldn’t enrol at the University without accepting the Code’s terms after its 2007 introduction, Castle Street was now aflame, as residents blatantly defied them. So the following year, Campus Watch was introduced to patrol student areas. Around the same time, the iconic student bar Gardies was shut down and transformed into the study centre ‘The Marsh’, partly to help distance the University’s image from the so-called ‘Otago student lifestyle.’ As Vice-Chancellor Harleen Hayne later told the Otago Daily Times in 2012, it was "no longer cool to behave in a drunken, disorderly manner." She continued to defend the University’s crackdown on student drinking, concerned that "the actions of a few would continue to overshadow all the positive things Otago students achieved during their time in Dunedin."
The University’s growing control over students’ personal lives and residences didn’t happen without resistance. A group of 350 student protesters gathered outside the Clocktower, holding signs reading "Consult us, you cunts", "Off campus, not ur fuckn business" and "You can’t spell Skegg without keg" – referring to then-Vice Chancellor David Skegg.
But the crackdowns weren’t just about drinking. Perhaps the first instance of the University cramping Big Red’s style was forcing the flat to call itself ‘Big Red’. That’s right — the red-bricked complex used to be called ‘The Cuntry Club’, with the convenient omission of an “O”. Campus Watch warned the flat that if a public sign was made, they could be fined up to $1,000 for “offensive language”. Asked whether the sign was a reasonable expression of student creativity or whether it overstepped the mark, then-OUSA President Logan Edgar replied, “Fuck, I don’t know what to think of that.”
Logan had figured out his thoughts by Monday, 8th February 2010, however, after the OUSA-organised Toga Party left George Street littered with eggs, rubbish, and glass — okay, par for the course — but also with smashed cars and shop windows, and people injured. When students arrested on minor charges were also accused of breaching the University’s Student Code of Conduct, and faced additional punishment, OUSA took the University to court. They argued the Proctor had overstepped his authority by enforcing rules on behaviour that took place off campus at an event the University hadn’t even organised. However, Justice Gendall dismissed their claim, ruling that the University had the right to govern the conduct of its “members” when their actions “affect the good reputation and standing of the University institution [...] in the eyes of reasonable and responsible members of the public.”
Gendall’s decision would go on to alter the course of Otago student life. And not without consequence.
1pm: Boys Banding Together
Finlay had answered “I don’t know,” eleven times in our five-minute interview, so I figured it was best to come back a couple of hours later. By then, Big Red had finally secured a venue for ‘Red-Out’: Horn Palace, a flat whose piss-ups are easily heard from the study centre across the road.
All the boys are in a much better mood as they spray paint red devils over any and all surfaces. They’ve also started preing – a sure-fire mood-booster. I ask one of the Horn Palace residents why they agreed to take on this massive night. He looks me up and down in confusion.
Kirin: We’re mates?
Ben: Just looking out for our friends.
Ollie: Big Red asked us. We were like, ‘Yeah, sweet.’
Critic: So for you, is hosting good for like, street cred?
All the Big Red boys start laughing and point to one of the Horn residents taping up a window ledge. “Yeah, especially this guy.”
To them, the idea of not helping out hadn’t even crossed their minds. Big Red needed help, and the budding bromance between them and Horn Palace was pure and sweet. Even though the host is at Horn Palace, Big Red is paying for all of it. For a single night, the 15 boys have had to fork out around $3900 for essentials such as lights, smoke cannons, the setup from Gravity Events, and the DJs. One of the Horn boys is letting Big Red hire his own personal decks at mates rates, which they all seem a bit relieved about.
The Proctor comes round to Horn Palace and seems pleased with how things turned out. With the neighbour’s property manager getting his way and the boys having a place to host, he has no reason to expect further issues. “Are you guys nervous about being the best host? Is it a competitive kind of thing?” I ask. They all shift their feet and look at each other. “Not really,” Ollie offers humbly. “If there’s like ten people it’d be pretty dry, but hopefully we get like fifty or a hundred people or like more… Yeah, like the other hosts.”
There’s a slight nervousness in the air. Expectations are high. This might be the last ‘Red-Out’ the street ever sees. It won’t be the same. A law professor tells Critic that if Big Red has a legal right to use the driveway, blocking them from doing so may be an interference with this right. But the boys won’t argue it. There’s not enough time, and this is just the way things are now.
Imagine a prison, but not just any prison — a circular one. A ring of cells, each facing inward toward a central watchtower where a guard stands and overlooks all the inmates. But there’s a twist: the prisoners can’t see inside the tower. They have no idea when the guard is watching, or if there’s even a guard in there at all. Because they might be watched at any given moment, they act as if they always are. They behave. They follow the rules. They fear the punishment. And that, French philosopher Michel Foucault argued, is how power really works. Not by brute force, but by making people surveil and discipline themselves.
It could be said that Big Red is one of Castle’s many metaphorical “prisons” and the Clocktower is more of a watchtower. Several hundred CCTV cameras survey the streets, Campus Watch is on patrol 24/7, and the threat of phone cameras (or rather, videos ending up in front of the Proctor) have all forced the hands of residents to ‘behave’ according to the ideals of authorities.
In 2023, police received only 13 call-outs to Castle Street — down from 51 in 2021, even in the midst of multiple COVID-19 lockdowns. The disappearance of weekly street parties has led 61% of students to declare that Castle Street is now "dead," according to last year’s Critic census. There were reportedly zero couch burnings during O-Week this year, an absence so notable it’s made national news. Last year, one of the biggest parties — Lakehouse’s St. Paddy’s host — had gone from a grassroots piss-up to a sponsored event with a PR-focus on "safe drinking". Events like ‘Courtchella’ are now wrist-banded and ticketed to minimise property damage. Gone are the days when the bond was just an additional rent payment you’d never see again. Even Big Red tells Critic the flat is keen to get their bond back in full.
Of course, this new-normal is being welcomed by many. When Critic asked why Big Red were prevented from using the shared driveway for their host, Fridge’s property manager Matt Morton had a straightforward answer: “There have been serious incidents already in the past with a balcony collapse during a large party on Castle Street, ending in a student becoming permanently disabled [...] With potential liabilities for a property owner, why would they agree and sanction a third-party using their property for a [host]? I cannot think of any reason why any owner would ever agree to that.”
Then there are the gang rumours that swirl around ‘Red-Out’ every year. According to legend, the night coincides with a Mongrel Mob initiation — one that involves assaulting female students. Yet on the day, no one seems particularly concerned about a looming gang presence. Finlay assures Critic he doesn’t know whether the rumours are true, as he’s “not in contact with any gangs” (we’d hope not, Finlay). Campus Watch are tight-lipped, stating it’s against policy to speak to Critic Te Ārohi. We do know that several girls’ flats were reportedly ‘red-flagged’ — a practice where gang members supposedly mark ‘easy targets’ ahead of the night. But a source tells Critic that one of these so-called flags was actually just a small piece of a hat mistakenly left behind by a tenant. This only fuelled the other theory: the rumours are a scare tactic to stop freshers showing up to Castle parties uninvited.
Even if gang initiations are a myth, there is still a history of safety concerns that many would argue justifies the University’s oversight. A University of Otago spokesperson tells Critic: “Every year, the Proctor’s Office proactively engages with flats identified as hosting major parties during [...] Orientation Week [...] to address safety risks and Code of Student Conduct expectations. The University’s involvement in connection with student parties is educative and pastoral [...] The primary objective of our CCTV network is student safety.” The spokesperson also wished to note that more than 90% of requests to review camera footage originate from students themselves and that the Proctor’s Office and Campus Watch “consistently perform highly” in annual student satisfaction surveys.
But safety doesn’t explain every instance of the Uni’s control over students’ private affairs. In 2018, it was discovered that the Proctor had illegally trespassed into multiple student flats to confiscate and destroy their bongs. He later sincerely apologised for his actions (prompting an OUSA Exec member to say, “We just decided to forgive him, [but] there will still be a protest; there will still be an expression of emotion.”) That same year, a member of Campus Watch took offence at Critic’s ‘Menstruation’ issue cover, and confiscated and burned the copies; sparking an outcry over censorship that made international headlines (at one point, reaching #1 on The Guardian UK, above Donald Trump’s talks with North Korea).
And then there’s the growing number of tenancy clauses that prevent students from hosting parties in their own flats. When Critic asked members of the Law Faculty whether these clauses were legal or interfered with the right to “quiet enjoyment of property” we seemed to hit a legal grey area — they didn’t know the answer (though Tenancy Services’ website states these clauses are “likely unenforceable”).
But landlords don’t need to worry whether these clauses are legal, when students self-enforce them without question. Nowadays, parties are smaller, antics are tamer, and the consequences are clearer — even when they are empty, black-letter threats.
11pm: The Last ‘Red-Out’
I’m now following Big Red’s journey on Instagram because my flat can’t muster the energy to go out on a Monday night (and I’d rather eat worms than be caught at a host by myself). The Instagram stories show a slow start, but hope isn’t lost. Sluggish starts have been typical of this year's O-Week, except for Courtyard’s ‘Back to School,’ which saw people drinking at 9 am.
By 11 pm, Castle Street has finally kicked off. Dressed in pyjama pants and a red hoodie (both for support and to avoid being mistaken for a fresher), I wander over sober to find the boys have pulled off the impossible. Without knowing the past twelve hours of drama, you’d think they had wanted to move the host down the road themselves.
The vibes are high. A half-crumpled RTD can lands at my feet, a cry of “fucking freshers!” echoes in the distance, and my co-worker Jono somehow ropes a senior constable into an interview – a surprise, considering police had been telling me “no comment” all night.
The constable explains that police have negotiated with the Dunedin City Council and the mayor’s office to hold off noise control complaints until the predetermined cutoff: midnight. “The students are really magnificent,” he says, praising their obedience in unplugging speakers at the stroke of twelve. The constable insists he’s a “great believer” in Dunedin-style street parties, but struggles to reconcile their size with the capacity of the flats, calling it “a recipe for disaster.”
There’s a running joke in the Critic office that all investigations eventually lead back to the closure of student bars — and this was no exception. Instead of putting down the pints and picking up the books, as the Uni may have hoped, students turned to flat parties en masse as the last remaining venue for the ‘Otago experience.’
The constable isn’t wrong, but it’s hard to ignore how different these rules are from the freedoms these same adults once enjoyed. Even Vice-Chancellor Grant Robertson, when asked last year in a sit-down interview with Critic about his own days living on Castle Street, hesitated before answering. “Um no, yeah, I dunno,” he stuttered. “I better be careful here, but yeah. I mean, look, you know, we enjoyed ourselves.”
I ask the boys of Big Red if they’re enjoying themselves. They reckon the host is going “real well,” all things considered. If the flat can claw back their right to host from the landlord by next semester, it won’t be the last time the street sees them behind the decks, hands waving to the crowd. But in the likely scenario they can't, the flat plans to pass their hosting duties along to someone else.
As I trek off into the night, back to my bed, I take one last glance at the red-crowd with a silly sense of melancholy. Two streets over, the bass has already faded. By the time I reach my front door, it’s silent.
The adrenaline and lawlessness that students expect from Castle legends have been swept up and zip-tied. Students are bored. The collapse of student culture feels a bit like living in the aftermath of an indescribable disaster or death. Although today's students have never witnessed it, nor can specify what has died, the feeling of loss lingers on campus. As one former Critic Editor penned in his last editorial: "There is no student body. It doesn’t exist. There is no cohesive group of students. Everyone has retreated so far into individualism, into digital and physical isolation, that an overall sense of community has been lost.”
But culture doesn’t vanish cleanly. Every few years, resistance to authority starts bubbling up. Flats, eager to reclaim their ‘traditions,’ start chasing a past they’ve never even known, a past that ceased to exist before they ever set foot on campus. And, inevitably, shit hits the fan.
The most recent example of this in collective memory is initiation-gate, where abusive hazing activities between second-years and freshers erupted in a national scandal. It started with a tub of water, an iPhone, and the abuse of a live eel. Then more initiation stories re-surfaced: freshers forced to strip and watch porn, urinated on, pelicaning (vomiting into each other’s mouths), chain-smoking inside a sealed wheelie bin, and being pelted with frozen eggs, which left a student blind in one eye, to name a few.
Many participants defended these initiations as a ‘rite of passage’ and an ‘Otago tradition.’ But upon investigation, they weren’t really a tradition at all — in fact, they were younger than the students themselves. What, then, was really being preserved? These initiations seemed less like heritage and more an assertion of dominance. ‘Tradition’ is a word easily thrown around by a student population desperate to resurrect a lost identity.
This struggle to preserve ‘tradition’ recently hit Big Red on a much more personal level. One thing inherently accepted about the flat, is that it’s boys-only. Last year, when rumours circulated that DNA Property Management was specifically selecting female tenants to soften Big Red’s reputation, many people were unhappy, including the male tenants at the time.
One section of the flat was offered to a group of girls, set to move in on February 17th this year. But they never signed. I reached out to one of them, Diana*, to ask why. Isn’t turning down Big Red the equivalent of Kamala Harris getting elected and then giving up the presidency? She tells me they received both direct and indirect threats from male students warning of short and long-term consequences if they moved in.
After Diana’s viewing, word spread like wildfire that girls were being offered Big Red, and everyone had something to say about it. Even a 2008 article from the Otago Daily Times states, “The boys' flats line the eastern side and the girls the west,” with Big Red sitting at the most Eastern point. “Surely [you] must have noticed,” a student interviewed suggests.
Gendered segregation wasn’t the only tradition the girls threatened to uproot. Until last year, it was Big Reds’ right to hand-pick which freshers would take over the flat in the following year. A representative from DNA Property Management told Critic that “this pattern reinforced [...] that destroying these flats was part of the culture,” a new concern for the landlord, who had invested significant money into renovations. Not being hand-picked was at the forefront of Diana* and her flat’s minds when deciding to turn down the lease. They feared Big Red would be broken into by old tenants “in a rage” that girls were now living there. If the male residents could no longer control Castle, they would at least control who lived there.
Like an ouroboros eating its own tail, students keep trying to resurrect a culture they’ve never actually lived, only to watch it collapse again. And some will go to irrational lengths — harassment, misogyny, and hazing activities indistinguishable from abuse — if it means keeping what little ‘tradition’ remains in their grasp.
The Next Day
The morning after, Castle is eerily quiet. I get the sense I’m in a much better state than the residents — probably curled up in a fetal position or off on dusty Maccas runs. The odds of them making their 9 am lectures seem low. Horn Palace’s front yard is buried under stomped boxes and crushed cans. A single red wig lies abandoned in the gutter. In the distance, Big Red looks untouched, as if the night never happened.
Despite the location swap, the theme of Big Red’s host remained non-negotiable. I asked Finlay if he ever considered departing from the ‘Red-Out’ theme, but the thought hadn’t even crossed his mind. Wearing red has been synonymous with the host for as long as anyone can remember.
It turns out some aspects of Castle Street are so entrenched that even landlords can’t undo them.
Last year, Big Red’s landlord optimistically planned major renovations for the flat, including a complete repaint of the exterior. While many of the changes went ahead, the ‘minty sage’ repaint never happened. I ask Finlay why Big Red didn’t turn into Big Mint. “I’m pretty sure this is a legacy building. So, the Council was like, ‘Nah, you’re not allowed to paint it.’”
And so, with traditions slipping through their fingers like sand, the students finally got a win — though not by their own hand. Big Red stayed red, not because of student defiance, or even the landlord’s will, but because the Dunedin City Council, the ultimate authority, said so.
Once, students set couches ablaze in the middle of this street. Now, they peek through curtains before taking a drag. Perhaps Castle Street isn’t quieter of its own volition. Perhaps it’s trapped in a prison of the mind.
*Names changed.
**The original article stated that Proctor Dave Scott informed Big Red that they had to cancel. This was not the case and the online article has been ammended to correct this inaccuracy.