Free Primary School Confidential by Woog Page B

something feral in us. The boys basically beat the shit out of each other in the snow, while the girls ran shrieking as a flurry of snowballs rained down on us. Here is a little something about snowballs: when packed down very hard, they have very little give. Like none at all. You might as well be throwing a brick at someone.
    After an hour, one of the teachers appeared at the door of the bus and yelled that our time was up. The lads made sure that they left as much yellow snow as possible, and we drove away from Dead Horse Gap nursing a plethora of injuries.
    So . . . that was our trip to the snow.
    The bus travelled back to Canberra, where, because our teachers had not self-flagellated enough on this trip, we visited the art gallery. Now, having taken groups of students to artgalleries myself, I know that kids have zero interest in looking at paintings and sculptures—unless the subjects are naked. Naked art is like gold.
    When you find a picture of a nude, you immediately alert your fellow pupils. You then gather around it to laugh and point. This will cause your teacher to come running in from another room and scold you all in a very vicious whisper.
    You disperse, still giggling. Then one of you happens upon a huge bronze statue of a naked lady. So you alert your fellow pupils—and so on and so forth until your teacher cracks the shits and you leave.
    Has every primary school kid on the east coast of Australia done a similar camp? Canberra? Clog factory? Dead Horse Gap?
    From what I can tell, the Canberra/Snowy Mountains trip is a rite of passage, as generations of teachers attempt to introduce students to our political system and our artistic heritage. Thank God for clogs and penises, I say!

9
    THE SMELL OF TEEN SPIRIT
    At the age of twelve, I was sent off to a posh boarding school in the northern suburbs of Sydney to be turned into a well-rounded, intelligent, thoughtful global citizen, capable of doing anything I put my mind to because I am woman, hear me roar.
    Twelve is a very young age to be let loose on the world, which was effectively what happened. Thirty girls from around Australia were thrown together in a dormitory and told to play nice. Add one geriatric old bag, the housemistress, whose accommodation was at the furthest point of the building, and hey—what could possibly go wrong?
    The boarding house was an old Federation number with worn carpets and the smell of teen spirit. When you entered the foyer, the housemistress’s apartment was to the left. On the right was a big staircase, which led up to a long hall. At the end of the hallthere was a room the size of a football field. This was divided into cubicles, each one housing four beds.
    Next to your bed, you had a small chest of drawers topped with a mirror and next to that, a small hanging space.
    The whole place smacked of neglect and was not exactly the sort of place that could be described as a lovely home away from home. I recall my mum unpacking all my belongings, making up my bed and then getting the hell out of there. I sat on the bed and ate an entire jar of green olives, watching as the three girls who were to share my cubicle came in one by one with their parents and their gear. Finally, it was just the four of us, sitting on our freshly made beds, looking at each other.
    One girl started crying and the rest of us went over and comforted her. And then we heard other little whimpers floating up over the cheap partitions. Soon the whole room was awash with tears.
    My six-year stint at boarding school taught me more about life than any part of the actual curriculum ever did. These years taught me to be rat-cunning, to question the establishment, to defy authority and to save my own arse.
    I will not go into all of the dreadful things the class of ’91 got up to, because some of you might actually have daughters at boarding school right this minute, and I fear that with the advances in technology since my day, things might have got even