Monash University is unique – for oh-so many reasons that I shan’t delve into – but in the context of student media, Monash’s singularity lies in the fact that within a fortnight of the first students stepping foot on the Clayton Campus – lovingly referred to as ‘The Farm’ – a student newspaper emerged, which would become known as Chaos. A letter from an editor at Tharunka (the publication of the University of New South Wales) declared in a letter in a June 1961 edition: “I’d like to congratulate you and your predecessors on the high standard that Chaos has so quickly reached. The majority of universities – including the University of N.S.W. – didn’t have any student journal until some years after their foundation, so Monash has done remarkably well for itself.”
From humble beginnings, as a nameless stencil duplicated production of four pages, under the editorship of Ian Dudgeon and Tony Reyntjes, Chaos quickly took off on campus. By its second edition, its length had doubled, it had acquired the name Chaos had been decided on at a general meeting – where the reportedly “unusual name for any newspaper” was chosen for “its metaphysical overtones” and had absolutely not “because of its aptness in describing the state of the University site at that time. Nor was it, they said, really meant to apply to the content and arrangement of a typical university newspaper…” – and a letters to the editor page appeared, a staple for Chaos and Lot’s Wife until 2015. By the third edition Chaos had evolved beyond simple stencil duplication and graduated to using multilith duplication printing. By the end of the first term in May, the newspaper’s 500 weekly copies distributed on Thursday were often “unprocurable” by the following day.
By the start of the second term Robert ‘Bob’ Hammond found himself as editor – owing to a peculiarity whereby the Publications Committee, who had responsibility for appointing the editors of Chaos and later Lot’s Wife, to appoint editors on a single-term basis though he would hold the post for two months, before resigning for “personal reasons” leaving Peter Smart to take up the task serving out the remainder of the term before handing over to Richard Lucy and Curtis Levy in September.
1962 brought with it a range of changes to Chaos, under the leadership of Curtis Levy, led to the adoption of a tabloid style, the influence for the style that would become a staple of the publication for the next 30 years is two-fold. One, it was modelled on The Age because that was in vogue for the day and conveniently The Age’s printers also printed Chaos. Two, “despite a much publicised animosity between the two journals” It seems to take on some of the elements of Farrago’s layout.
From June, Geoff Parkin finds himself yoked to Chaos right in time for scandal to rock the paper for the first – but certainly not the last – time. The front cover of the seventh issue of Chaos for the year appears with a relatively blank headline reading ‘Chaos Staff Expose’ an insert accompanies the mysterious cover declaring “No! We didn’t run out of front page copy. Our grand scheme for a sensational headline scoop had been cunningly thwarted by the omnipotent Herald-Sun Newspaper combine.” The threatened legal action resulted with the University threatening to intervene and demand the resignations of the staff. Though Chaos would weather the storm, and under Graham Stone would end “an expansive year… [growing] from a roneoed sheet (in about 18 months or so) a full-scale university newspaper recognised throughout Australia and in many countries overseas.”
In 1963 under the editorship of Graham Stone, Curtis Levy and later David Armstrong would continue to grow in size and readership. Though Chaos would be regularly subjected to censorship by its printers who refused to print among other things the word ‘f*ck’, and encountered controversy over several anti-semetic remarks made against a Professor from the University of Melbourne. These incidents resulted in blank spaces littering editions throughout the year. These controversies led to heightened calls, mainly in letters to the editors, for greater scrutiny of Chaos and discontent amongst readers in general. The editors did their best to repel the arguments being made in their editorials.
April 1964 brought with it the resignation of David Armstrong, and in his place Ross Cooper and Ross Fitzgerald were appointed. They too would fall afoul of the same issues as their predecessors, it was evident that something was going to have to change. In their first edition, rather than curtail the “revolutionary” nature of the writing within Chaos’s pages, they double-downed. When The Age refused to print a slew of articles, they simply published a supplement entitled ‘What The Age Refused to Print’ which included a scathing introduction written by the editors, which declared “since we have already declared our sympathy for such writings and therefore feel personally involved, we are seriously considering changing our printers or resigning unless a satisfactory solution can be reached.”
The events of the next month have become something of an urban legend at least at Monash, not helped that it was the official explanation on Monash’s website, and was once described by someone who witnessed said events as “a comic opera version of how it began.” The legend in short involved a group of students fed up with the sexism and other assorted bigotry inherent within Chaos, storming the Chaos office and taking the paper for themselves – a hostile takeover if you will.
In reality, the story is monotonous and Following the release of the sixth issue of Chaos for the year, at the year’s fourth Student Representative Council meeting, Messrs Fitzgerald and Cooper were relieved of their position. Depending on who one asks of said event, their resignations were not the only reason for them being relieved of duty. Discussion points at that very student council meeting range from the fact “you [Fitzgerald and Cooper] failed to carry out the policy you put forward in the selection interviews.” to “technical competence and lack of liaison between editors.”
Whatever the reason, there was now a distinct lack of editors, which rendered the administrative atrophy of student media at Monash. To fill the void left by the two Rosses, Tony Schauble, Damien Broderick, and John Blakeley were appointed in their place as provisional editors but would go on to edit for the paper until May 1965 when they announced their retirement in the editorial.
As editors, they – to use the words of Damien Broderick in an interview twenty years after the fact – “seized control of the rag [Chaos] and changed the name, on very similar principles to those which apply after the liberation of a third-world nation, but with considerably less justification.” And so it came to pass, that on June 24, 1964 with the publication of its seventh issue of the fourth volume Chaos would become Lot’s Wife, a name “fraught with significance.” for a variety of reasons largely to “tidy up” the paper after three and a half years of chaos – see what I did there – and scandal.
Although the content of the publication, nor the scandal and chaos associated with it, may not have changed much in the last 60 years, the rest, to use the popular cliche, is history.
