94. The Classroom Graveyard, Kyneton

I have no idea what this place is called, this vast acreage where portable classrooms go to die, but it's a tour de force of both installation art, and of participatory art, through which one is meant to define a physical relationship with these art objects, which reaches a kind of artistic nirvana here, for me at least, as most of my undistinguished teaching career were spent in them. These rooms that were later declared unfit for human habitation. These rooms that were declared to be beneath third world standards, by a group of visiting teachers from some third world country, who stood at the back and watched me teach. These rooms where one needs to know the trick to opening their sliding doors, each having a different trick. I'm certain that's the one where I had to stand clear of the hole in the roof when it rained, and there's the one where I refused to send Emma Groome to the coordinators for wearing doc martens by pretending I didn't see them. There's the one where measurements were taken and it was 52 degrees but nothing was done about it, and there's the one where I let a Year 8 English class take their shoes off one even hotter Friday afternoon and just sit on the floor and simply listen to me read a chapter from the novel Holes as anything else was cruelty beyond measure. And there's the one with the sound of nesting birds behind the speaker, and the ones where the speakers didn't work at all. And the ones where so many Year 7 histories were taught, including describing the Egyptian mummification process in hopefully nauseating detail, and so many Year 8 English classes, the best of which where the creative writing sessions, and there's the one where the head prefect, Skye Nichols, gave me a Valentine's Day flower, as she remembered something I'd said five years previously about never having received one. And there's the ones where I taught Year 9 Info Tech and the best of which was teaching HTML coding. And there's the one were I took Junior Strings rehearsals every Wednesday morning for more than twenty years, all those violins, violas, cellos and double basses. And there's the one where I'd burn an ex-library book in to demonstrate the thinking of Shi Huang-ti. And there's the one which I excused myself from one Year 7 English class when I just had to vomit, suffering a headache that would have killed a lesser mortal, and making it to the fence just in time. The class at the time thought it was a hangover, but no, it wasn't. And there's the rooms where I rehearsed all those Greek plays, Medea (twice), The Trojan Women (twice), Electra, Agamemnon, Antigone ..