Diana Wichtel: Scarfie fact stranger than fiction

Tradition. Och aye, it's grand. Dunedin's got bags - or should that be sporrans - full of it, spilling out of gloomy gothic buildings into streets that seem oddly untouched by the 21st century.

It was our second graduation ceremony in that city's magnificently overheated town hall. Half the youth up our way seem to migrate south annually to experience student life as it is enjoyed nowhere else in this country or, possibly, the world.

Where else would you find a supermarket willing to come to collect its trolleys from student flats, thus saving Scarfies the bother of chucking them in the river Leith?

At the end of each academic year flat rubbish is hurled onto the streets for the council to remove, with prizes for the most heinous pile.

The cricket grounds used to transport student sofas to the terraces, our most recent graduate informed us. They don't any more. Why? Because people kept setting fire to them. Why? It's a Scarfie thing, along with the riotous Hyde St Keg Race, porridge wrestling and sprints carrying those sofas not already burned.

Then there are the infamous Thursday night $2 drinks as the city's bars vie for the Scarfie dollar. A certain alcohol-induced haze seems to hang over, as it were, Dunedin student life. Which could account for the rose-tinted nostalgia of so many former Otago students.

I'm sure the city needs a new motto. It looks as if it needs a new everything else. How about "Dunedin: You Can't Regret What You Don't Remember"?

As we, and other horrified parents, have discovered, the grossness of student life depicted in the cult movie Scarfies was an understatement. When, on our first foray, we arrived at number one son's student flat, there was a smoking stump where the letterbox should be. Someone had set fire to it the night before, possibly to cook something on. I guess they couldn't find a sofa.

The other son lived for a time in something affectionately known as the Brick Shouse, where they were saved the need to wash the kitchen floor by having a shower that did it for them.

I went to Otago as a student myself, briefly, for my first arts festival. It seemed to take days to get there. It did. There was the overnight train to Wellington, pausing for the obligatory cup of tea and a tepid pie in Taumarunui; the ferry ride across the Strait; the bus to Christchurch, another to Dunedin ... It was about as comfortable as a camel trek across the Gobi, only colder.

Even these days it would be quicker, and often cheaper, to fly to Sydney.

In my student days hippies had largely taken over Auckland University - and that was just the staff. By comparison, Otago University seemed quaint and Presbyterian. They had people called proctors who patrolled the town, making us take our feet off the furniture. They could evict students from the pub even if you were of drinking age.

They still have them - "Student police", confirmed our graduate. But the struggle for control of Dunedin is long lost. If the Scarfies swagger - or stagger - around as if they own the place, it's because they do. Dunedin has uniquely adapted to meet their need for substandard housing, cheap booze, 24-hour munch and furniture to burn.

Do Scarfies respond with gratitude to this indulged existence? "Nah," says our graduate. "Dunedin is a city of broken glass." It's a symbiotic, if slightly dysfunctional relationship. Scarfies are a primary industry. While landlords clean up the glass, they're laughing all the way to the bank as they rent out dumps at $65-plus a room.

Another tradition, one Scarfie told me darkly, is not getting your bond money back. And many students pay for the best years of their lives for the rest of their lives with student loans of epic proportions.

Never mind. We happily trudged up 20 steep flights of stairs to the packed cheap seats at Town Hall for yet another procession of silly academic hats, plus the inevitable kilts and bagpipes.

Och, heck. Still, I enjoy a rousing sing-along of that old academic favourite, Gaudeamus, the cheerful subtext of which is that we should live it up now because the worms will be gnawing our rotting flesh soon enough. This may or may not be a good thing to tell a bunch of students about to hit the streets for a night on the turps.

A visiting famous scholar and former Scarfie informed the sceptical assembled parents that these fine youngsters before us were the most knowledgeable in the history of the world because they knew how to find out things and had access to unprecedented ways of doing so.

Actually, most looked like they couldn't find a bun in a bakery and would look worse after the celebrations ahead. Still, we were filled with pride at how much study ours had managed to fit in around the drinking and snow-boarding, and at having another offspring take part in the arcane traditions and mindless rituals of this chilly, peculiar corner of the world.

Otago's Scarfie colony is as unique to the place as the albatross colony, the yellow-eyed penguins and haggis. Our kids have had a chance to experience life somewhere as different from the North Shore as a sort of heavily kilted, heavily drinking version of Mars. Even just as a visiting parent, it's been an education.