5 minute read
Our place
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A year or so ago the Good Weekend in the Sydney Morning Herald had as its guest in the regular Your Time Starts Now column someone called Adrian Keating. There is always one question which goes: Your earliest memory is… and Adrian’s answer was “Playing in the bush at Glenaeon”. What a pleasant surprise to find our school mentioned in the national press. I followed up and found that Adrian had been a student at Glenaeon in the 80’s and is now a professional violinist.
Lindsay Sherrott and Winki Chevalier, our long term bush regenerators and friends of the Middle Cove grounds. iwas reminded of Adrian’s note last week when teacher Catherine Pilko showed me some of the writings from her class about their current Main Lesson, Our Place: An introduction to the Geography of our local area. In this main lesson the children are introduced to the subject of Geography through a study of the school grounds, then extending out to look at the local area of Willoughby.
Here is what student Julian Kopkas wrote describing his appreciation of the Glenaeon grounds…
‘Our little school is an amazing place… birds humming in the trees, brush turkeys tapping at the classroom door, blue tongue lizards scuttling around the rocks and kookaburras laughing for no particular reason at all. But the really amazing thing about the school is the Bush… silent creeks, noisy waterfalls, damp grass, ticklish ferns and a clear blue sky. So it is the perfect place for a bushwalk…’
The children learn their first mapping skills and Lindsay Sherrott, our esteemed groundsman who knows literally every tree on the site, takes them on guided walks to introduce them to the secrets of the Glenaeon grounds. They see the three waterfalls that adorn our property, walk down to Scotts Creek as it curves through mangroves out to Middle Harbour, and follow the foreshore around to both Castle Cove and Castlecrag. There are many magnificent trees on the grounds, and some outstanding sandstone formations, including a number with indigenous significance. There are birds and animals that use the grounds as a corridor between adjacent bush areas. The finale of this intensive study of our site is an overnight camp on the oval where some parents join the class for the first step in the outdoor component of the Active Wilderness Program which runs through the whole school.
As the students grow older we study the grounds in a more sophisticated way, and their appreciation deepens. Here is the
comment from a Year 12 student.
“Since I started at Glenaeon in Class 5, there have always been particular spots in the school grounds where I love to be. One of those spots is on the grass near the oval bridge… I thought of all the different ways I appreciated and understood this spot. When I was in primary school, the class took bushwalks through here to get to let us get to know the land a bit better, and to feel at home in the school’s massive grounds. In early high school we were taken here for a Botany main lesson and were taught the names of the native plants and animals by Lindsay the school bush regenerator. Now in my final year, I was studying the biophysical interactions and hydrological processes of this dry sclerophyll scrub forest ecosystem for Geography. I sat there thinking about how the school had provided me with all of these different ways of understanding and appreciating the natural environment I was so lucky to be in every day. Doing this gave me the feeling of peace I needed to get through the next few hours…”
So wrote Georgia Van Toorn in her Year 12 major project thesis in 2005, describing how she prepared to present a Forum to 150 people in the school hall on the topic of The Environment in Modern Western Thought. Her words speak for many students, teachers and parents about the special environment that is the Middle Cove grounds. Generations of students have revelled in the school’s bushland setting, a place for games, play and wondering at some of Nature’s many messages. Adrian Keating’s comment in the Good Weekend speaks for many former students, in whose reminiscences’ “playing in the bush” almost always gets a mention as a highlight of their time at Glenaeon.
But our bush cannot be taken for granted, for it was not always so pristine. Vast tracts of lantana choked the creeks, and all sorts of exotics were in competition with the natives. Over the past twenty years, Lindsay Sherrott with co-worker Winki Chevalier have cleared the intruders and brought the bush back to some semblance of its former state. Such bush is a unique place to spend childhood and adolescence, a piece of Australian nature that is a beautiful and healthy backdrop to school and learning.
It is also a unique place to learn about. Over their years at Glenaeon, we provide a range of ways of learning about our grounds. Starting with play, then through exploring, and on to scientific awareness: as Georgia put it,
“all of these different ways of
understanding” this unique bushland setting for a school.
It all starts in this Class 4 Geography Main Lesson. An important background is of course the indigenous heritage, and the students learn how the Cameraygal people, the original owners, lived and connected with their land. We learn about the almost religious feeling the first owners had for their land, expressed through their creation stories, and try to build a sense of reverence in how we treat the bush.
The children produce a book of drawings, maps and written reports about their experiences. The Main Lesson lays a foundation for a deeper connection with our grounds, one that builds respect and a sense of stewardship for this particular part of our native heritage. We hope that for the children, it will help make “our playground” into Our Place.
