The Past is a Foreign Country

1975, the year I turned nine, was the most intense of my life, the stuff bildungsromans are made of. I’ve always felt blocked in writing, under the apprehension this year must be faced, before what’s inside me can truly develop. But my responses - to what would be the climax in my imagined bildungsroman, a trauma that resulted in my chief persecutors expelled - bore and abhor me (with myself, not the event; a German reflexive verb is required but out of my range). 

It was the year my parents, ex-teachers themselves, had encouraged me and my sister to attend an experimental school at the foot of Mt Wellington in Hobart. The school was modelled on Summerlea; if you’ve read The Silver Chair, always my favourite Narnian, the atmosphere of such a school is imagined perfectly. No rules, no formal lessons; student-led lessons, student-led justice. We ran amok. We had the most exhilarating, educative experience of our lives, exposed to hippy ideals and the outdoors, camping and creativity. 

There were about thirty of us, aged between seven and twelve, a mix of kids - middle class dreamers, school misfits, and a couple of mountain locals. My sister, that cute little spunk, the youngest at the school, full of charisma, was the school mascot. I on the other hand was regarded as strange fruit indeed, strange/ugly rather than strange/beautiful, and was bullied relentlessly. I cried every day of that school year, but I dreaded school holidays, the bigger picture of the school being so mind-blowing compared with the narrow confines of my experience thus far. 

I discovered this image (this framing device), not in an old fashioned attic, but in a new fangled memory dump - a Facebook alumni group, a shared google drive, the hurried and illicit (?) scans from a library archive. I’ve found it before, but not seen myself there. In the jumbled undated images spanning twenty odd years and multiple iterations of the school, it’s difficult to identify those from its inaugural awe-full beginning. In my first reconnoitre I didn’t recognise any of the faces, only eventually one that might be a fragment of the cute spunky younger sister, and then yes, definitely, one of the teachers. And then this, a scan of multiple negatives (are they negatives, the image seeming positive?), definitely including me - first queuing up for food, channeling Oliver! - all maudlin fascination with Where is love?; then most definitely me, clinging forlornly to someone’s trouser legs. 

Is this around the time of the traumatic event - which occurred at one of the only camps we had that was not under canvas? Just as I don’t recognise any of my fellow students, I don’t recognise the location, only my child-self - irritatingly self-pitying and unresilient. That at least is how I perceived myself perceived, as the earth opened before my eyes in a frightening, impassable chasm. I have never been able to embrace and forgive that child, or the adults who made her feel that way. 

Perhaps, this is how I start?






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