Goodbye Sunnyholt Rd... (Part 1)

Or, how I threw in the towel and left Sydney and my teaching career behind me.

My Facebook memories showed me this photo today: it was taken on 13 July 2023 in Manubread, a French Patisserie that makes good coffee and excellent sourdough bread, in Invermay, Launceston, Tasmania. This was my first visit to Manu, at the end of a long weekend I had spent, also for the first time, in a house I bought off the internet, sight-unseen, just a few weeks earlier. Weeks, barely even months. I knew about Manu Bakery before that trip, because when I was in the process of deciding (which wasn’t much of a process at all) I had done a bit of idle google-map searching in the area I was looking at buying in, in the interests of, you know, being responsible and all that. I mean, you wouldn’t buy a house sight-unseen off the internet in a state you had only visited twice in your entire life and a city you hadn’t been in in more than 40 years without checking there was decent coffee to be had, now would you? I wouldn’t say having Manubread two minutes walk away was the deciding factor in all of this — because honestly, there was no deciding factor, I just bloody did it — but it didn’t hurt, either. Yum.

So what brought me to this? What made me “throw in the towel and leave Sydney and my teaching career behind me”? Not that you could really call it a career. But more of that — lots more — to come. First of all, why did I do it and what was I thinking?

Well, first of all, I had been trying to decide what to do with the third act of my life for ages. In 2010, I had bought a lovely old weatherboard colonial cottage in the Hawkesbury in Sydney’s North-West outskirts.

At the time I was working in a job I loved, and which I had hoped would see me out to the end of my working life. I was running a state-government and local government-supported literature/arts program for children and teenagers across greater western Sydney, based in the suburb of Blacktown, which was about half an hour’s drive from my new old house. It was a job I had worked for more than twenty years towards, and while it was incredibly stressful, it was also enormously rewarding and despite having to please too many “stakeholders” (or individuals who thought they knew best even though they never came to a single program or event I ran) I knew I was doing really meaningful work. Sadly, economics and, who knows, personality politics got in the way and after nearly a decade of nearly killing myself, I was waved goodbye without any procedure, and barely a thank you. (Four wine glasses, if I recall correctly… )

Anyway, that’s a whole other story for the memoir when I’m too old to care if I get sued.

So anyway, I went off and did a few other jobs, some freelance work, sessional tutoring and casual (relief) teaching, enrolled in a PhD (still unfinished) and then ended up going back to teaching. I was really lucky in the first school I landed in, with a wonderful head teacher (English is my subject) who I had known since we were in primary school together, and the opportunity to do the role of Teacher Librarian for two years, covering a maternity leave. I ended up staying at that school for four years, two of which were brilliant, two of which were not. (Let’s just say some people are nort cut out for job-sharing and that, people, is not me.)

Meanwhile, my parents were getting older. My dad actually died in 2017, just before I returned to full-time teaching, and then a couple of years later my mum got cancer for the third and last time. I had been putting off making a decision while Mum and Dad were still alive, as there was no way I was leaving Sydney while they were with us, and leaving my sister with even more caring responsibilities than she already had (which was about 98%!). By the time Mum and Dad were both gone, and I had the money to do the repairs on my old house, it turned out that to do all the work necessary would have eaten up all my inheritance, which in turn meant I was stuck teaching… and I did not want to be stuck teaching. My other option was to sell up and move, but there was nowhere I could afford that I wanted to live. I felt really, really stuck for about 2 years. And then I got myself unstuck.

The year after Mum died, I made a fresh start at a new school. It was on the face of it, a great opportunity, with a new library being built, but unfortunately, I found very quickly that there were many things about the culture and organisation of that school that meant I could not in all conscience stay. I’m not going to go into specifics, because the malaise in public education in NSW is bigger than individual schools, and the next school I ended up at was an even worse experience for me, and I was starting to get a bit desperate. I knew for a fact I had completely aged-out of working in the arts or publishing industries again. (I had gone for jobs I really should have walked into — in fact, one of them had been more or less written for me — but they ended up going to less qualified, less experienced, but much younger people than me. None of them stayed out their original contracts.)

The Last School, the one I started at last year, had some great things going for it: lovbely head teacher, brilliant library tech as my offsider, and some absolutely gorgeous students. Also some awful ones. But you get that. But it’s also much harder to take the older you get. I was starting to find myself impotient and angry with even the nice kids, and honestly, once that happened, I knew I had to get out. Because I wasn’t really angry with them, I was angry with what had happened to public education, and to the teaching profession, in the 25 years or so I had been away from it. I’ll get to that shortly, or maybe in a Part 2 to this, because it’s already long.

So, there I was, half-way through Term 1 and realising I was in yet another untenable situation, and wondering what the hell I was going to do, when an old friend and colleague contacted me, and invited me to speak at a festival in Hobart. Actually, he didn’t have any money to bring me to it, so he asked me to record a video on the topic he wanted me to talk about (why it’s OK for school and other libraries to chuck books out), but instead I decided to pay my own way and have a mini-break in Hobart while I was at it. (Thanks Mum, thanks Dad, thanks outrageous Sydney real estate prices.)

I had, of course, a brilliant time, and discovered what a wonderful and thriving literary community there is in Tasmania, and how gorgeous it was, as I remembered from my only other trip to Tassie — which was a family holiday in 1981, when I was in Year 12. I discovered there were people I knew in the writing community who had moved to Tassie, and I started thinking… what if? I mean, like many mainlanders (that’s what we Taswegians call people from the, well, mainland…) I had joked often over the years about chucking it all in and moving to Tasmania. What if I actually did it?

I got back to school after my mini-break, and the person who was making my life an utterly raging misery pissed me off within minutes of getting back (not for the first and certainly not the last time…) and so I logged onto realestate.com.au and started looking at properties. I quickly realised Hobart was a bit expensive, so I looked at Launceston. Had no idea what living in Launcestion would be like, just knew it was the other city in Tasmania. And within minutes I had fallen in love with a house. Within days I was organising finance with my mortgage broker (that sounds grand, eh!) and within less than two months I had bought myself a house and changed my life.

My family, bless ’em, could not have been more supportive, and my friends the same. It all happened so quickly, but here I am, a year since my first visit to my new home, and nearly ten months since I moved here for good, and while it might have been the craziest thing I’ve ever done, it was also the best thing. And the best sourdough in the state is just a two-minute walk from my front door. Viva la France! Viva la Launny!

I’m going to leave this here for now, on a happy note, and come back with a Part 2 about why I could no longer stay as a teacher in NSW public schools.