To beguile many, and be beguil’d by one.

I've just got home from a school drama performance. I don't go to these very often any more—I have a few nieces and one nephew who were into drama, but they've all finished school now, and anyway, it was only the nephew who was in Sydney, so I didn't see too many of the niece's productions at their school in Canberra. And I don't have kids of my own, and I'm not a teacher any more—so what was I doing at a high school drama performance?

It was, of course, related to the day job, but this is in fact a school that, curiously, I have a strange kind of long-standing connection with.

More than ten years ago, when I was working on the Nestlé Write Around Australia program at the State Library of NSW, I got my dander up one day reading yet another tribute to private schools in the Sydney Morning Herald. This time, they reported on the end of year speech given by the principal of some posh eastern suburbs or north shore or wherever the hell it was school. Truly. The principal's speech given at the speech night. Featured news. But only if it's a private school. So I took up my pen (actually, that's sheer rhetoric; I wrote it on a computer of course) and wrote a letter to the editor that went something like this:

I look forward to the day that the end of year speech made by the principal of Rooty Hill High School is front page news in the Herald.

They published it.

The next day, the principal of Rooty Hill High School, Christine Cawsey, also had a letter published in the paper, thanking me and saying she'd be delighted to supply said speech any time the Herald cared to run it.

I was horrified, because to be honest, I wasn't even 100% sure when I wrote the letter that there WAS a Rooty Hill High School. I chose the name because Rooty Hill is such an iconic western Sydney suburb and I just knew that it would have the right resonance for the point I was trying to get make. But when Chris's letter was published, I was mostly just worried I'd inadvertently offended her, and the school and the students.

So I rang her. And she laughed and said nothing could be further from the truth. What had happened was some of the school's senior students had read my letter (extraordinary enough, because as we know, kids don't read any more, especially not newspapers and especially not kids from a suburb like Rooty Hill and even if by chance they did it would especially not be the Sydney Morning Herald*) and rushed into her office saying, Ms Cawsey! Ms Cawsey! Is your speech going to be in the paper? and so alerted her to it (because school principal really DON'T have time to read the newspaper, especially not the letters page, although knowing Chris as I now do a little, I bet she would have got to it eventually). And so she wrote her response.

And we laughed more about the whole stupidity of the media's bias towards public schools and how we'd, together, struck a blow against it, and that was that.

I heard or read Chris's name often enough over the years—she's been president of the public schools' principal association and was and is often asked to comment on a variety of issues to do with (public) education, on the radio, in the papers—but as far as my personal association with the school went, that was kind of it.

Until I started in the Day Job.

I don't write about the day job all that much on this blog. It's tricky—writing about work is always tricky, for any blogger, but made particularly so by the fact that WestWords (aka The Western Sydney Young People's Literature Project—like our fancy new name?) is hosted by a local government council, and there are very very strict media protocols for council employees, which I am, even though our project is a regional one funded by Arts NSW (of which, more anon). But it's been a good week for WestWords** and for me as a result, and I don't think there'll be any objection to this particular post.

Back in the early days of WestWords (it's been 4 years now!), early in 2008, one of the first people to independently contact me to find out more about the project was Honor White, the teacher librarian at—Rooty Hill High School. I met with Honor at the school, and we chatted about the project, and she gave me some contacts and ideas about who to talk to in the education department and it was all really lovely and supportive. And then I mentioned the great SMH Speech Night Letter Incident, and was delighted to learn from Honor that Christine Cawsey was still principal of the school. So I popped my head into Chris's office and introduced myself, and bless her, she remembered me and the Incident.

Since then, I've been invited every year to the school's annual creative writing competition presentation, and then this year, the connection kicked up into a whole other level.

Back in April 2011, we attempted to run a series of weekend poetry slam workshop, in partnership with Miles Merrill's Word Travels company, leading up to a poetry slam night at Blacktown Arts Centre as part of Blacktown's youth week events. It was a big investment for us, and a lot of work, but we just weren't getting any kids to enrol in the workshops. It was looking like the whole thing was going to crash and burn, until I got an email from  the Head Teacher English at—Rooty Hill High School.

They had a whole bunch of kids interested in the poetry slam, but they couldn't, or wouldn't, come to the workshops on Saturdays. Either they couldn't get there under their own steam (public transport infrastructure in western Sydney being even crappier than public school funding), or their parents couldn't commit to driving them into Blacktown three weekends running, or they just lacked the confidence to step outside their (emotional and geographical) comfort zone. (Remember, Rooty Hill is a suburb of Blacktown, but it's also its own community—Blacktown is HUGE!—and many of these kids don't travel far from home at all, ever.)

And so we took the workshops to the kids, and to the school.

I collected two amazing slam poets from Blacktown Station and we drove to Rooty Hill High (past the Rooty Hill RSL, so big it ran a mock campaign to get its own postcode!), where Bravo Child and Tom ran the most fantastic workshop with a large group of some of the most wonderful, self-aware, open and brave teenagers I've ever met in my life.

The kids loved Bravo and Tom, who were fierce in their admiration for and support of these kids—about 6 of whom turned up at our first big venture into evening youth events, the inaugural Blacktown Youth Week Poetry Slam—The Rumble.

It was SUCH a night! We had about 40 audience members turn up—awesome numbers, trust me—and these amazing young people got to perform alongside experienced and professional performance artists, including Miles and Michael Simms, a national slam champion from the US. We even had a primary school student—the younger sister of one of the Rooty Hill High kids—perform the speech she was to give at her school's public speaking competition. She was tiny and awesome. Bravo coached the kids again before the event, and I still remember how emotional the whole night made me.

But that wasn't it. After our event, Miles stayed in touch, and ended up going to the school himself for a follow up workshop, and from that, a core group of three students—G, I and S (excuse the initials but I have to be really careful about identifying them without their permission) ended up performing at—get this!—the Sydney Writers' Festival.

The Sydney Writers' Festival. I kid you not.

I wasn't there—which I will always regret—but these three amazing young people from western Sydney got up and performed their stuff—about who they are, where they come from, where they want to go in life—in front of 400 people at the Wharf as part of Sydney Writers' Festival.

And what were they most excited about?

They got to meet The Chaser in the Green Room.

I love those kids.

Right about now, I have to mention their drama teacher, Anjelica. Anjelica is only in her second year out, as we teachers (and ex-teachers) say—her second year teaching. She's young, she's tiny, she's talented and dynamic and so committed to these kids it makes me weep. She has most recently organised for the company that is touring Kevin Spacey's Richard III to hold their secondary drama student workshops at Rooty Hill, and all those kid will get to go and see the production and attend a Q and A with Spacey and the company. And she's set up a drama club at the school—with plans to take it regional—which brings me to where I was tonight.

At a high school drama production.

A couple of weeks ago, I received an email from Anjelica, written by her wonderful drama kids, thanking me fore the opportunities they'd had through WestWords and the poetry slam, and  inviting me to their first production. It was such a gorgeous, heartfelt invitation, there was no way I could have, or would have wanted to refuse. And I'm so glad I could be there.

With, apparently, only about 6 weeks of rehearsal, students from across several years, rehearsed and produced an abridged version of Othello. Not only that, they also wrote their own (hilarious, if somewhat anarchic) play called The Trial of BB Wolf and Curly Pig, in which BB Wolf (played with astonishing comic timing and utter conviction by our afore-mentioned slammer, 'I') is plaintiff against Curly Pig, whom he accuses of attempted murder for that pot of boiling water in the fireplace...

Honestly, the Pig V Wolf play was a delight and a hoot, but with minimal props or set, and, it has to be said, experience from the cast, their reduced Othello was actually extraordinary.

We were in the school's dance studio—a double classroom, really, so the "stage" was about 5 feet deep and as wide as a classroom (less, actually—there was "wing" space as well). Some of these young people had never acted before. Our slammer/wolf 'I' played Roderigo with equal parts humour and pathos. Cassio had the flair and charisma of an adolescent Toby Schmitz. Iago stalked the stage with menace and threw a mightily sinister glance over his shoulder every time he left the stage. Desdemona was sweet and loving and frightened; Emelia moved from frustrated and slightly desperate to deep grief and anguish and guilt—she made me weep. And Othello hit his stride in the beautifully choreographed scenes of demented jealousy and rage—his presence grew with every scene.

The set:

The highly multi-cultural cast turned the racial elements of the plot upside down and inside out.

Oh,
and I sat next to Chris Cawsey, the (still) principal of this amazing
school. I bet she was wishing, as I was, that the Herald (and the
Telegraph and the rest of the world) were there to report on the small
triumphs made every day by the likes of teachers like Anjelica, and kids
like 'I' and his peers in schools tucked away in suburbs with
unprepossessing names; like Rooty Hill.

_________

*Sarcasm

** We've had triennial funding confirmed from Arts NSW—project secure for 2012-2015! plus we will soon have our own dedicated website, woot woot!