The Crown has refused to admit it, but Critic turned 100 last Wednesday. As promised, we’ve done our best to be as annoying about celebrating and commemorating ourselves as possible. We’ve bothered countless alumni repeatedly for favours – contributions and direction for the birthday issue, donations to the centenary book, and advice for how on earth to encapsulate a century of continuous content creation. Suffice to say this may have been one of the hardest issues to collate, knowing we would inevitably miss something.
As the generation of Critic to be charged with birthday celebrations, we’ve felt the pressure. 100 years is a long time. I haven’t seen this much creative block among the team since that one time last year where we turned our struggles into a half-assed culture piece of our strategies to get around it. But regardless of what’s made it into the pages of the birthday issue, it’s been the process behind the scenes that’s been most valuable.
Locked away in the office on the Critic grind, it can be easy to tunnel vision into the magazine of today. What’s been incredible is the push that the 100th has given present-day Critic to learn our own history and tug on the capillaries of Critic alumni that lead back to the beating heart of Dunedin. We’ve run back and forth from the Hocken Library countless times, and there was one night spent parked up on the floor of the office with a box of old issues each, yelling over each other in a show-and-tell of our finds: “Dude, they had a ‘Queer of the Year’ award in 2000.” One writer remarked that it was crazy to think she was reading an issue put together the year she was born.
The underlying theme of the entire celebration has been Critic as an identity. It’s more than a magazine: it’s a collective noun for the revolving door of people who have poured a part of themselves into it. Whether they’ve submitted a poem about drunk freshers typed with annoyance in the middle of Catacombs, doodled a cartoon about a post-lockdown orgy in the middle of the street, or been one of the many to sacrifice their grades on the altar of student journalism, trading lectures for door knocking Castle Street (again) – they’re one of the many to have contributed to the institution we call Critic and have an instant point of connection to others who have, too.
The gravitas (and pressure) of the 100th year has been reinforced through working with the Hocken, who have been wonderful. Their intellectual interest is infectious and having academics pore over past issues of the magazine that you’re still actively contributing to puts a certain perspective on the weight of responsibility. It’s like continuously adding to a time capsule knowing that future iterations of Critic will refer back and wonder what you meant by a certain turn of phrase or slang. While first-years will always be called freshers, the scarfies of old (millennials) and breathas of today (Gen Z) will probably adopt a new name at some future juncture.
What we have learned is that Critic has always been, and will always be, dominated by sex, funny stories about “freshers”, stupid letters to the editor, one too many – and also never enough – em dashes, snarky quips in brackets (fuck you, it’s a great way to frame a joke), apathy about student elections, antagonism for the ODT and Salient, and cannibalised content from our own archives – like the stolen quips in this paragraph.
An important note is that while Critic’s 100th is a celebration, it’s also a chance to reflect on what Critic hasn’t done so well over the years. Our Ētita Māori found a gaping hole in the archives in our Māori coverage and more than one alumni said they wished they’d lived up to the name ‘Critic’ more. Whilst telling stories of defending articles almost to the point of fisticuffs, they still think they could have done more to print a magazine with as much bite as Hagrid’s class textbook.
These are lessons we’ll take under our wing. And as the temporary custodians to the name, we’ve also done our best not to be the ones to finally get the magazine cancelled for good (they gave it a good go in the naughties) or burn down the office when we considered trying to light a hundred candles on the birthday cake.
There’s only so much we could squash into 60 pages (up from the usual 48) so anything “historical” is a skim. Head along to the Hocken’s exhibition or start saving for the book pre-orders for an official history. In the words of 2000 editor Fiona Bowker in her 75th anniversary recap: “I’m hanging out for the glossy covered book, the real blood and guts history of Critic.”
In honour of our oldest living editor’s instructions to the 80th editor in 2005 – “I hope and pray that you and your gang will get together to celebrate the first century. Speight’s will still be the best drink” – crack open a cold brew and cheers to another hundred years of occasional accuracy. Cheers to a magazine that has sparked so much passion, so much delicious debate, so many careers, and so, so many memories. Lest Critic ever die.