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The Spike [or Victoria University College Review 1961]

Notes

page 5

Notes

Too Much has happened at Victoria since the last Spike was driven into the Student Body for this, the latest, to cook, dehydrate, quick-freeze, process and package the lot. I had hoped to follow The Spike's founders' vow to make The Spike 'a free lance, dealing out to each and all their just meed of praise or blame without fear, prejudice or favour'. But no one had anything really pointed to say.

*

I had hoped to follow Lytton Strachey's example by attacking the life and work of Victoria in unexpected places; falling upon the flank, or the rear; shooting sudden revealing searchlights into obscure recesses hitherto undivined. But this would take a better man than I — best leave the scandal to Salient.

*

So I tried the other Strachey technique — I paddled my rubber dinghy out on to the ocean of facts and finders of facts that is Victoria, and lowered my little bucket down here and there, hoping to bring to light of day some characteristic specimens of those far depths, for examination by your careful curiosity.

*

Some buckets came up empty, some full of unfulfilled promises, some overflowing with eager self-glorification, some with opinions, some without, some with sense and others without, and some were the sort of stuff I wanted. So I threw out the uninteresting, the juvenile, the mistakes, and ordered what was left to be set in very large type.

*

Surprises have been how few students can talk about anything interesting — even the religious liked talking about themselves; how few scientists can talk sensibly about science; how inefficient the efficiency experts; how efficient the poets and illustrators and musicians.

*

The Literary Society special committee gathered material of merit with remarkable speed and lack of fuss. Elizabeth Allo, Peter Bland, James K. Baxter and Gordon Challis are 'name' poets contributing to this issue. And in eighteen-year-old N. W. Bilbrough the committee think they have made a genuine discovery. 'These poems, in spite of some minor technical imperfections, impress us for a particular simplicity of expression, for the rapidity of their impressionistic sketches, for a sort of thoughtful reaction to life, rare in the usual run of University poetry' was their comment.

*

Maurice Shadbolt, author of The New Zealanders, is the guest-writer of this issue, with 'Nightfall I, an atmospheric short story never before published; J. K. Baxter, also a well-known New Zealand figure, offers a very interesting autobiographical piece; Les Cleveland, a West Coast story; Mark Young, a young poet, has kept in his 'The Sur, and the City' something of the poetical approach of his more usual medium; the short story by R. Amato 'shows a certain departure from the conventional, formal approach to the short-story technique'.

page 6

The Spike has had a long and decaying history. In its formative years it was the only university student publication; it was full of news, comment, sport, heavy handed jollity, and acres of the most incredibly bad poetry. Over the years the function of publishing these things has passed to Salient and the Old Clay Patch — Hilltop — Arachne — Experiment line. Look there, historians, for the life of Victoria.

*

In the past editors have cried out for an annual Spike. Unless people want the park cleaner's Spike that this edition is, or enough students and staff members with sharp pointed ideas can be found, then The Spike had better be driven into the ground and its subsidy used to brighten its successors.

*

However, we, the students of Victoria University (as is as never was) have a brand spanking new Students' Union and Gymnasium, which may help turn our night school into a real university, and then a monthly Spike might not be near enough. This Spike celebrates their erection and that hope.