Well, it’s back to school for students and teachers in most parts of Australia for another year. As a second grandson starts his 13 year ordeal, I was reflecting on the start of mine in a tiny one teacher school at Warkworth, in the Hunter Valley of NSW, in 1963.
My father was the principal and my teacher for the first five years of my education along with three other boys in my class. All thirty or so students from K-6 were in one big room.
The school rooms and Principal’s residence were in one combined building close to the Wollombi Brook and surrounded mainly by dairy farms and orchards. The school had a large oval and a tennis court and my brother and I spent many happy hours exploring the creek as we got older. We left Warkworth at the end of 1968, after eight formative years there, when my father was appointed to a larger school out West.
I have been back to Warkworth several times since; 1978, 1983, 2001 and most recently in 2017. In 1983 my wife was pregnant with our first child and the school was still in operation and classes were in progress when we arrived. I introduced myself to the Principal and explained my connection to the place, where I now lived, worked and so on. I had recently been promoted to my first management position at IBM. The Principal asked me to give an impromptu address to the students suggesting I emphasise that even if you come from a little school in small rural village, you can still achieve great things in the world!
By 2001 the school had closed and the building had been converted to one home, owned and rented by the coal mining company which had bought up all the former farms. The landscape, now one huge open cut mine, was very unfamiliar and the roads were dominated by large trucks ferrying the black cargo. On this trip I re-created my first day of school photo and made many other photographs of the village and surrounds.
On our last visit in 2017 we had a long conversation with one of the tenants who said they were facing eviction as the open cut mine crept closer to the building. Due to the health risks of coal dust, she was advised the company was unlikely to continue to rent the property and it may become a temporary office or storage facility. Otherwise, it might be demolished.
No doubt I will return to the place of my first day of school in future and reflect again on the influence of the landscape of our childhood on who we have become. You can take the boy out of Warkworth but not Warkworth out of the boy.
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