Monday, December 16

They're predicting 29 degrees today; it's overcast so it will be humid.  We have nothing planned and I imagine we'll stay indoors.  Gone are the days when the period leading up to Christmas was frantically busy with frequent trips to the shops and desperate cleaning of the house.  Nowadays, all the Christmas food will be delivered to our door, any gifts we need to buy will come from Temu or Amazon and the television will keep us entertained and up-to-date with what's happening. 

We're watching a Youtube video of a fellow called Noel Phillips traveling to the island of St Helena.  Noel himself is a bit of a pain in the neck but he manages to get to places we can only imagine and, apparently, he makes a very good living doing it. Who would have thought that travelling the world with a GoPro camera could be a sensible career choice.  Marilyn says if I don't agree with his career choice I shouldn't watch it.  And, probably, I'm only jealous.

RIGHT PLACE, RIGHT TIME                                                                             0CT0BER 21, 2022

I suppose all of us at some time have looked back on our lives and wondered why they have turned out as they have.  What was the circumstance or set of circumstances which set us on the path which led us to the place we now occupy?  Can we identify one event which steered us in a particular direction?  I’ve spoken to friends about this: Derek told me it was the day he walked past an Army Recruiting Centre in London and thought “Why not?”.  That decision led to a long career in the Royal Marines.

Virginia says it was the day she looked at her doctor boyfriend and realised she couldn’t envisage a life as a doctor’s wife, said ‘Goodbye’ to him and applied for a teacher’s job in a different city.  People’s lives are often multi-dimensional, with twists and turns which demand decisions which will likely have unforeseen effects into the future.

It’s hard to pick a point in my life which was any more consequential than any other.  Was it the time I realised Accountancy was not for me and I stepped onto the path to becoming a teacher?  Or was it the time my wife and I decided that our child deserved a better education than was being offered in our Sydney suburb and made the significant move to Hobart?

Among all the crossroads on my life’s path, one stands out as being somewhat different to the others.  It doesn’t involve career or family; rather it opened my eye to a different way of looking at the world and gave me a new appreciation of what can be regarded as valuable outside the narrow focus of the middle-class lifestyle I was shaping for myself and my family.

I was teaching in a small independent school in Sydney, responsible for a class of Years 3 and 4 students, laying the groundwork for a career which might eventually provide the sort of lifestyle I anticipated: a suburban home with a mortgage, enough money to have occasional overseas holidays and 2.4 children who would look after my wife and me in old age.  In the middle of a Maths lesson one day, the Principal appeared at my door with a young man, clean shaven but hair a little longer than usual.  He was dressed in khaki shirt and trousers, with solid boots and a rather anxious expression on his face.

The Principal said, “When you’re free, have a chat with Jim.  He has an interesting proposition for us”.  It was almost break time so I wound up the lesson and we each pulled up a chair.

Jim was no salesman but he was certainly persuasive.  He told me about an organisation called Ausventure which had established an Outdoor Education Centre in Kangaroo Valley south of Sydney.   They were encouraging school groups to come for week-long courses which would introduce students to activities such as canoeing, rock climbing, caving and so on.  They also ran camps during school holidays, some specifically for children with disabilities, including Autism.

I couldn’t have imagined then how much my life would change following that twenty-minute conversation.  The initial visit with my class led on to more and more trips until my wife and I were spending most of our school holidays in that environment.

Ausventure’s philosophy was to get the children out of their comfortable middle-class existences, allow them to get dirty, wet and cold, give them wholesome but unremarkable food and avoid distractions like television.  Nobody told our students when it was time to shower or when it was time to change their clothes.  We spent the days exploring the local bushland and the Kangaroo River.  The children were challenged to make decisions, deal with the consequences of those decisions, take risks and to achieve things they had never faced before.    Some of our students had never before been alone in the dark with no streetlights and only the moon to help them learn about their surroundings. In the evenings, after dinner, we read poetry, told stories and played games.

Through Ausventure, I met people for whom adventure was a way of life: who had climbed in the Himalayas, worked in Antarctica, cycled the Birdsville Track.  I became interested in ecology and protection of the environment and I started to see the value in broadening my life choices and, particularly, broadening the curriculum beyond the ‘three r’s’.

It's no exaggeration to say that meeting Jim and eventually going on to work at Ausventure changed my approach to teaching and, in fact, my approach to life. I was in the right place at the right time and I often wonder what my career would have been like if Jim had gone to the school over the road instead, or my principal had said, ‘No thanks, not interested’.