Public School Kid
Written by Jo Newman, Illustrated by Issac Curran - July 16th, 2020
I went to a high school whose bus run was dubbed the worst in the city by our local transport authority. Students set fire to bus seats, bought and sold (and stole) drugs mid-journey, kicked out emergency exits and bolted through the twisting streets.
Sometimes, we were left stranded halfway home by drivers who’d had enough. Sometimes, they just refused to turn up.
The school itself wasn’t much better. We had an ongoing feud with the school in the next suburb over. At lunch time, students would make the pilgrimage across the ‘burbs to beat up their peers. One day, a girl I had grown up with grabbed another by the hair and slammed her head into a solid brick wall, dragging her face across the rough stone, before kicking her in the stomach and dumping her on the ground. I don’t remember what the fight was about. These things happened all the time.
The school liked to counter this rough-and-tumble image by flaunting its specialist programs at every opportunity. My first year, I started out in the fashion design course. I never vibed with our moniker, ‘Fashion Girls’. I was too nerdy, not cool enough, decidedly unfashionable. In my teenage mind, Fashion Girls were glamorous and put-together. Fashion Girls knew the names of designers. Fashion Girls made stuff that the others oohed and aahed at, and had dreams of running their own labels.
And me? I spent my spare time in the science block, blowing up beakers with superheated steam.
The school had other specialist courses too, and each came with its own stereotype. There were the aviation – or Avo – Nerds, who got their private pilot licenses before they could drive a car. These kids spent their afternoons building fully-functional light aircrafts in our school’s hangar, and almost exclusively went on to study engineering.
The tennis kids mostly kept to themselves, so nobody really paid much attention when the course got canned halfway through my tenure. They didn’t even get a fancy name with capital letters. It was a shame, because the tennis students were actually a pretty decent bunch, and most of them left after that.
And then there were the Cricketers. Picture your stereotypical Hollywood movie high-school jocks, with some Aussie bogan thrown in for good measure. They weren’t all bad, don’t get me wrong, but they were the darlings of the school and they knew it. Gotta skip music class to play cricket? No worries. Need to reschedule an exam to visit the local sports stadium? Of course. Have an irresistible need to bully the theatre kids until they break? Hey, go for it, my dude. The school’s got your back.
My high school, much like my primary school before it, was racist in the most well-intentioned way. In my first year, they gathered up all us Aboriginal kids, from years eight to twelve, and dumped us in the same tute class, headed by perhaps my least favourite teacher in the whole school – a tiny, angry woman who reduced our ancestors to a bunch of savages in loin cloths. The school did this, I imagine, with the intention of creating a community for us there. But all they succeeded in doing was marking us out as different.
Later, when I was making straight As in my academic extension English class, they decided to teach us poor, uneducated Aboriginal kids how to read. Once again, they segregated us and lumped us all together. Once again, they humiliated us and our cultures. I cried the whole way home that day, and stopped identifying as Aboriginal on school forms a week later. The colour of my skin made it easy for people to forget – and they seemed all too happy to forget – so I buried my identity.
Come Year Eleven, I had to make a difficult choice. Would I continue with the fashion program? Or study something ‘useful’ and ‘productive’ like science? I was good at science, one of the best in my year, and the school’s resident geologist believed in me more than I believed in myself. But I loved fashion design too. For a while, I was trapped by my own indecision, torn between two possible futures. They were both equally alluring. I didn’t want to have to choose.
Ironically, the school was even better at typecasting its students than us teenagers were, and tried damn hard to choose for us.
We’re a vocational education pathway school, they said. Our students hardly ever get into uni anyway, they said. Only straight A students should be considering a full load.
Never mind that I was a straight A student.
But they went on. If you must do TEE subjects, four is enough.
Us nerds — Mainstreamers and Fashion Girls and Cricketers and Avo Nerds alike — banded together and called in the big guns: our parents. After a lot of back-and-forth, the school eventually conceded. A bunch of us not only got into uni, but did so with ATAR scores higher than the school had ever seen before. The year after we left, they founded a ‘95 Club,’ for students with ATARs 95 and above, and have been boasting about their high-achieving students ever since.
In Year Twelve, two months before final exams, I moved out of home. I did my exams, somehow, in the midst of a depressive funk. I hardly studied. I guess people at school knew something was up, but no-one ever really said anything. I’ve run into old classmates in the years since, and if it ever came up, I learnt that they were oblivious. We were all dealing with our own crap, living in our own bubbles of final-year isolation, and I was very good at pretending everything was fine.
Eventually, it was over. I’d done it. I’d survived high school. I had a plan for my future — an environmental science degree and a job on the mines, setting up house somewhere far, far away — and an acceptance letter to my top choice university. It was the same one my mum went to, fresh out of the desert, ready to get an education. I was going to be the second person on her side of the family to get a university degree. I had fought fucking hard for my place, and I was ready to claim it.
Fast forward eight months or so, to a bright-eyed little public-school kid sitting in their first university lecture.
I was so excited to be there, at the most prestigious university in the state. I had my notebook and my pen. I was fresh out of the suburbs and ready to get an education.
Cue everyone else in the room opening up their flash new MacBooks to take their notes, when I didn’t even have access to a home computer.
I didn’t last six weeks.
“I went to a high school whose bus run was dubbed the worst in the city by our local transport authority. Students set fire to bus seats, bought and sold (and stole) drugs mid-journey, kicked out emergency exits and bolted through the twisting streets.”
- Jo Newman