I had seen my older sister heading off to school each day and couldn’t wait to get there myself. However, by little lunch on the first day I had decided that was enough and taken myself home. Eventually I came to love the school experience, probably because I was fairly good at most of what happened there. We enjoyed Reading, Spelling and Comprehension, Mental Arithmetic, Geography, Nature Studies, Art, Physical Training and History. Each week on Friday morning, we had a spelling, dictation and mental arithmetic test. I learned to add, subtract, divide and multiply. I learned my times tables and have never forgotten them. I so much enjoyed tracing countries of the world from my atlas and transferring them to my geography book, colouring in the countries and pencilling in a lovely blue fringe around the islands, naming and placing the capital cities in appropriate spots and marking in significant features of the landscape (never dreaming I would drive down and up the exotic sounding ‘Great Dividing Range’ at least once a week); copying down text from the board onto my lined page and drawing the parts of flowers (so helpful these days with crosswords) on the facing blank page; learning how to draw a stick figure; completing physical jerks and playing rounders; and learning an inaccurate history of Australia.

Our history text was History through Activities. I have a copy still. When I was growing up, teachers were revered, and everything that came out of their mouths was the truth, so it didn’t seem strange to me when we were told there were no Aboriginal people in Tasmania. I was used to being called a ‘half-caste’ and it wasn’t until much, much later that I realised how derogatory this term is.