Year 4 and 5 Ōpoho School students have written a letter to Otago University students asking them to stop leaving litter at Brackens Lookout (AKA the Cemetery). Students essentially told the children to get fucked, saying that the letter was “too long” and that they “don’t really care”. That’s a great look, guys. Nice one.
The lookout is a popular piss-up spot for students on days like St Paddy’s, especially freshers, who have limited options for unsupervised drinking spaces. A skip was brought in on St Paddy’s and a clean-up was held afterwards, but on less newsworthy days the place is usually left a tip. We really, really tried to find students with a good attitude about this, but the best we got was “ceebs”. Fuck me, I guess.
The kids have been working for the past couple years with the Town Belt Kaitiaki to keep the lookout clean, which has included many hours spent planting trees, weeding, and cleaning up rubbish. Most of this rubbish is glass bottles and bottle caps, as Uni students apparently love their “fizzy drinks”. Aww. At the end of last year, they allegedly collected seven full bin liners of rubbish. Not aww. Adorably (and correctly), the Ōpoho kids are concerned that this litter will be “harming creatures, plants and people.”
Ōpoho students Amelia, Rach and Josh (aged 8 and 9) expressed their frustration in this letter that they have been forced to take responsibility for all the fizzy drink rubbish. “It’s not fair because we are students that are aged 7-11 and university students are nearly adults or adults…We should be able to look up to them but they are not being good role models.” Hear that, Castle? You’re role models.
Critic Te Ārohi spoke to first-year Alex, who lives at Arana. He explained that, since students living there are not allowed to drink until 4pm, “if there’s an event like Baseline last weekend or the rugby the weekend before where it starts way before that time, we don’t really have anywhere to go without getting in trouble with our hall.” Alex also said that drinking at the cemetery is thought to be “like a rite of passage, almost”, with his crowd finding out about it through “word of mouth around home from people that have been to Dunedin.”
But when asked if students gave much thought to other members of the public, Alex simply responded: “Oh, God no.” He said that he and his mates often go there to play possum, a drinking game involving parking up in a tree with a box until it’s empty. “We’re probably the culprits. We just drop our drinks out of the tree”, amongst other things. Alex proudly claimed, though, that his lightweight status was equivalent to being an eco-warrior in breatha terms since, while “most people will have glass bottles and cans”, he could “stick with my Nitro. So that’s a bit easier to put in the bin.” Good for him?
The Ōpoho kids went as far as to include suggestions to fix the problem in their letter, with ideas like fining people littering in outdoor spaces, introducing more bins and security cameras, or, our personal favourite, raising the drinking age to 30. Or the schoolkids could show them how it’s done: “The students could be taught how to look after it. We would be good teachers.” Out of these options, Alex thought that a fine would probably be the go: “It would definitely deter people from littering.” Or just more bins, he said, since the one bin that is there can tend to take a beating on days like St Paddy’s.
The kids’ teacher, Mr Abbott, told Critic Te Ārohi that the idea for the letter came from a unit the class is doing this year based around whakawhetai, “which is recognising all the things in our lives that we are grateful for.” The kids placed the environment and many local areas high on their lists, and he said that part of what helped hook them on Brackens Lookout was “the idea that they could be leaders and help teach older students. They found it rather confusing that anyone would be so disrespectful to the environment, especially as they are adults.”
Based on some of the responses we got from freshers, however, Critic doubts the maturity of these “adults”. Unicol resident Emily* wasn’t confident that the letter would make a dent in the cemetery party culture, saying freshers would either “disregard it” or they just “wouldn’t read it. Like I feel like it’s too long. Yeah.” And while Mr Abott said he thought “the children would be keen to invite uni students to help tidy Brackens Lookout on our next visit”, Emily remained apathetic: “[Students are] too lazy, I feel.” Alex said that he’d gone back to clean up once before, but in general, “we really don’t care.”
*Name changed.