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Stoneweek transforms UC

By STEPHANIE ANDERSON

Nine a.m. Monday morning and res is buzzing. It feels like Christmas morning. From the early hours, the thump of music fills every corridor. Bottles are popping from dawn till dawn. Everyone around you are smiling, laughing and dancing. The alcohol flows freely. The different coloured shirts from each res surround you.

It’s the week we’ve all been waiting for, the week we’ve been celebrating for more than forty years. It’s Stoneweek.

In 1972, students celebrated the first ever Stone Day. The day was held in recognition of the then named Canberra College of Advanced Education’s first birthday. The name came from the University’s iconic Foundation Stone.

By 1976, Stoneweek was born, a legendary week of partying and frivolity. Since those humble beginnings, both the University and the festival have changed and grown.

Today Stoneweek is a six-day marathon of events and parties every day, all day. The week finishes with the Stonefest music festival on the Saturday. It’s a week filled with school and res pride.

Events range from naming ceremonies, trivia, Octoberfest and “Thirst Day” to “Nemesis Day”, football, a tee-shirt contest and floor crawls among many others. Some of these events are as old as the University itself.

My first experience of Stoneweek lasted all of two and a half days. A hung-over game of touch football on the UC Meadows ended badly. Long story short it ended with me being reluctantly carried home with a broken leg. My red, Old Res shirt barely saw the light of day.

Organisers of several Stoneweek events, including Stonefest, UC Live, were forced this year to downsize the event significantly due to a lack of interest and ticket sales.

The manager and programming director at UC Live, Anna Wallace, said that despite the downsizing, this years’ Stonefest “Rock on Party” was a great success.

“We’ve had really good feedback … so many people have been saying it was like the Stonefest they remembered,” she said. “It was more organic, more like a uni party.”

UC Live maintains that the decision to downsize Stonefest was not solely a financial one.

Wallace said, “It helped to create a better atmosphere. It was in the best interest of both the artists and the punters.”

UC Live would most likely stay with this smaller Stonefest format for the next few years.

“In the future we will try to let the festival grow and evolve on its own, as it did in the past,” she said.

As you can imagine Stoneweek has attracted its fair share of controversies over its many years, and this year was no exception.

The University of Canberra insisted this year that the traditional Stoneweek Res tee-shirts comply with strict rules about offensive material. Shirts couldn’t bear the University’s name or the name of any UC res, nor could they display any offensive words or images. (Picture: LUKE DURKIN)

Students were also obliged to adhere to a strict code of conduct for the week. Any student seen to be acting inappropriately was subjected to very harsh punishments from both the University and the residential management company, University of Canberra Village (aka CLV).

Wallace noted that at the various events run by UC Live during Stoneweek, students were generally very well behaved.

“When it comes to bad behaviour, we operate under the restrictions of our licensing agreements, but at the trivia, UCtoberfest and Stonefest, the behaviour was good. It was a really good week,” she said.

As Stoneweek drew to a close, the scale of clean-up became evident. The UC residences were subject to several acts of bad behaviour including several fire alarms and some property damage. Residents are now understandably expected to pay for any damage they were responsible for.

Since the early Stone Day and Stoneweek festivals, many things have changed: the duration, the name, the location. What have not changed, and probably never will, are the sense of school and res pride students portray, students getting rowdy, and the consumption of copious amounts of alcohol.

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