H for History

I do not remember very much about being in Year 1, but I do remember sitting down somewhere very, very close to where the current Year 1s have a classroom, close to thirty years ago in my early 20s. That evening, I spent hours pulling bindi-eyes from my socks.

It was a privilege to be invited by Melinda Hamilton, on behalf of the current Year 1 staff and students, to pop over with an old, dusty, leather-bound photo album and spend time telling yarns about the area directly underneath where the Junior School buildings currently sit. As Melinda explains, “I asked George to come and speak to us because our inquiry into ‘Where We Are in Place & Time’ had us looking at how custodianship over time affects places. So we were interested to see how Radford has changed as different students have attended it… Before George’s visit we initially looked at photos from the archives to see what this area looked like before Radford was built and compared it to a picture from 2007 when the Junior School was being built. And then we drew what it looks like now. This helped us to understand how the school has changed! We even looked at the location of the new Year 3/4 building and considered how that area will also continue to change.”

It was a trip down memory lane for me – well, up memory hill, to be exact. In those early years, I used to take my English classes “out bush” to write poetry. What was a few hundred metres’ walk from the Year 9 Block felt like a day’s hike amidst complaints about the distance we had to travel “to find our muse in nature”. I had to also negotiate a myriad of complaints about those pesky bindies, sneaky and scratchy branches, and the oppressive heat. But looking through the photos taken of those artistic jaunts, and flicking through the eventual finished products – in an annual collection containing one poem from each student (refined when back in civilisation) – I think the lesson plan’s objective had been satisfactorily achieved.

I told my wide-eyed Year 1 new buddies some stories about the area where their classroom now exists: about how I met a humungous kangaroo on a reconnaissance of the area. We became a little side-tracked here for a minute or fifteen as my little friends were evidently all brimming with the delight of sharing a plethora of roo-facts, figures and anecdotes. They also seemed curiously fascinated about how one of my students composed poetry more effectively while sitting in a tree (Doug B, if you are reading, this a shout out to you). As young Elsie stated, “I got to see a picture of dad reading in the grass and his really smart friend up a tree… maybe you can write better up a tree!” Indeed. Spurred on by this, I did ask the Year 1s if any of their parents had been students at the school “way back then”. Despite the statistical unlikelihood, I was bowled over to learn that not only did they all have parents who went to Radford, but they were all also in my Year 9 Creative Writing class. Simply miraculous. (Upon researching, at least a dozen parents of kids in this class are collegians from various time zones.)

As I walked back across the zebra-crossing between the junior and senior campuses, across that road which – from my photographs – could barely be seen back then for the long grass and trees, I couldn’t help but smile at the wonder and imagination of those terrific Year 1s. And all the while recalling, despite the blurriness of those now-treasured photographs and pictures inside my own fading memory, a similarly wondrous series of lessons about “where we are in place and time” which now seem to live on emphatically in those modest poems written by equally fertile imaginations some three decades earlier.

If you were in Mr H’s poetry class in the late 80s and early 90s, drop him a line at: George.Huitker@Radford.act.edu.au or fill in the form Help H.