By Ella Mcevoy
“How many people here went to a public school?” I had just started a job at one of the country’s major newspapers, and amidst a discussion about class and privilege, some staff decided to take a straw poll. Mine was one of the few hands that shot up.
My place at Stanthorpe State Primary School was predestined. My mother, known to most as “Mrs A-B”, taught there. This had its drawbacks, at times, for both of us. For Mum, it was when she was filling in for my Year 2 teacher. During a handwriting lesson, her painfully nerdy 7-year-old felt the need to point out (rightly) that her lower-case ‘t’ shouldn’t be touching the red line. For me, it was when Mum thwarted my attempt to bin my vegemite roll, scrunched into a tight ball inside its brown tuckshop bag, and made me take a bite of the mangled bread in front of my amused friends.
Vivid moments are burnt into my memory: being too nervous to eat my cornflakes before the (always windy) athletics carnival – justifiably so, when I tripped a few strides from the finish line during one notable 200-metre race. The jar of musk lollies Ms Vetter kept just for me, because the lolly snakes that usually rewarded good behaviour got stuck in my braces. The smell of pancakes frying when Mrs Draheim let us cook in the classroom after we won a softball final. The stuffy silence at the Civic Centre before the girls’ choir began the first tentative notes of “Take These Wings”.
My status as an SSPS alumna will always be a point of pride. And if my daughter’s future workplace takes an impromptu survey to gauge who attended a public school, her hand will be raised.
