Please listen up and listen well, freshers: this disgusting display is not tradition here at Otago. The eggs, yes, and the flour bombs, sure. But before you start cultivating your own rancid buckets o crap for next years batch, remember this: those idiot bystanders were trying to hurt you.

Dunedin City Councillor Dave Cull  and Otago University Students Association president Edwin Darlow were interviewed by Mark Sainsbury the following day on new programme, Close Up, and the shock of the event is clearly still with them.

Teige OSullivan and Ben Thomson were first years in 2009 and experienced the parade first hand, on the Dunedin Flat Names Facebook page, Ben said, [We] got pelted with eggs, fruit, human feces and everything in between. An other first year student commented in the Otago Daily Times,As one of those first year students who was a participant in this event I was appalled by how violent this annual event was.  During this event I felt like I was being herded like cattle while the other students hurled bottles and things at us.

In 2010 Teige and Ben took on the lease of  Cumberland Street flat with 7 other male students. They renamed it The Debacle, as Teige said, to represent the 9 boys that now live in it and the activities which take place within the flat. [The] name originated from this video from a[n] American news report on the toga parades last year.

About 5 seconds in to the video you can clearly hear the reporter, Ed Donahue (Associated Press), describe the parade as a debacle.

Video source: The Associated Press (25.02.2009).