Musing Upon an Art Teaching Career. Brian Hawkeswood.
Author: Brian Hawkeswood.
At fifteen, I sat in a sterile room, the weight of anticipation pressing down on me. The woman across the desk, after scrutinizing my test results (what I thought at the time to be an IQ test) looked up and said, “We think you can work for the local council.” Her words echoed in my mind, a verdict on my future.I was a teenager attending a high school at Emu Plains, a suburb on the outskirts of Sydney, Australia. The area was named by early European explorers who, in 1790, mistook the land for an island and noted the abundance of emus roaming the plains. These majestic birds, once integral to the landscape, were driven to near extinction in the region as settlers expanded their footprint.
At the time, I didn’t grasp the true nature of the test I’d taken—it was an aptitude assessment, a tool designed to chart my potential career path. That evening, lying in bed, the ceiling became a canvas for my swirling thoughts. The notion of a life spent collecting trash or sweeping streets filled me with a profound dread. To me, it felt like a sentence to a life devoid of purpose, a bleak existence I couldn’t accept. The word Art was never mentioned. I had always considered myself an Artist for as long as I could remember; I always painted and drew so I must have been an Artist; right? There was a definite contradiction between what I was told I could be and what I thought I already was. My education never had a component that taught me what money or finances were so this was never a consideration; not then anyway.
My family’s circumstances offered little solace. My father was a fleeting presence, often lost in the haze of alcohol, while my mother, burdened by the weight of our reality, seemed powerless to alter the course of our lives. The prospect of breaking free from this predetermined path felt daunting, yet the fear of remaining trapped in a life unchosen ignited a spark within me—a determination to seek a destiny beyond the confines of expectation.
“A Childhood Shaped by the Australian Bush”
The Australian bush was my first great love. As a child, my brother and I would lose ourselves in the vast, untamed wilderness surrounding our home in Glenbrook, nestled in the lower Blue Mountains of New South Wales. I was only five years old, my brother just eight, yet those early explorations left an indelible mark. The towering eucalypts, the chatter of cockatoos, the scent of sun-warmed earth—all of it bound me to nature, to the unique rhythms of the land, and to the creatures that called it home.
At the time, I had no idea that the sense of wonder I felt was something artists before me had sought to capture on canvas. It was only in my first year at Sydney University that I learned about a group of painters who had worked under the open sky, much like the French master Corot. These artists, now known as the Heidelberg School or the Australian Impressionists, sought to depict the light, atmosphere, and rugged beauty of the Australian landscape with a new and distinctly national vision.
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“A Chance Encounter with Norman Lindsay”
As I grew older, my adventures took me further afield. I roamed the mountains on my bicycle, pushing beyond familiar trails. One day, in the nearby town of Springwood, I stumbled upon an old house nestled deep in the bush. To my amazement, I discovered it had belonged to Norman Lindsay, one of Australia’s most celebrated artists. The house had since been transformed into a gallery, and though I was too young to enter at the time, I would often return, pressing my face against the glass, peering at the paintings inside.
Norman Lindsay “Adventure” Oil on canvas,
Many would assume that a young boy might be captivated by Lindsay’s infamous depictions of the female form. But for me, it was the sheer mastery of his craft that held me in awe. I would stand for long moments, mesmerized, thinking, How does he do that? How can someone paint with such precision, such accuracy? His technical brilliance far surpassed my own crude, untrained attempts at painting. His work was humbling, a reminder of how much I had yet to learn—but also, how much there was to aspire to.
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I studied Lindsay’s unfinished work “The King and His Harem” (The title I gave it) and began to learn to paint.
Norman Lindsay: Master of Sensuality, Myth, and Fantasy in Australian Art
Norman Lindsay (1879–1969) remains one of Australia’s most distinctive and controversial artists, celebrated for his masterful technique, rich imagination, and ability to blend classical themes with a uniquely Australian sensibility. His work spans painting, drawing, etching, sculpture, and writing, but he is best known for his sensual, highly detailed depictions of the female form, his allegorical subjects, and his fascination with mythology.
Subject Matter: Sensuality, Myth, and Fantasy
Lindsay’s paintings are often filled with voluptuous, idealized female figures, frequently portrayed as nymphs, sirens, or goddesses. These figures, often nude or semi-nude, exist in lush, otherworldly settings that draw on classical mythology, literature, and his own vivid imagination. His paintings reject the puritanical attitudes of early 20th-century Australia and instead celebrate themes of sensuality, decadence, and rebellion against moral conservatism.
A prime example of this is The Bacchanal (c. 1920), where Lindsay depicts a frenzied, joyful celebration of satyrs and nymphs in a scene reminiscent of classical Greco-Roman orgiastic revelries. The figures are rendered with a masterful understanding of anatomy, and the painting exudes movement and uninhibited pleasure.
His work was also deeply allegorical. In The Crucified Venus (1912), he presents a provocative reversal of religious iconography, replacing the figure of Christ with a nude female, symbolizing the oppression of sensuality by religious dogma. Such paintings cemented his reputation as a radical and defiant artist, frequently at odds with societal norms.
Painting Techniques: Mastery of Form and Light
Lindsay was a technical virtuoso, displaying exceptional skill in both oil painting and watercolor. His figures are meticulously drawn, with an emphasis on idealized anatomy, flowing contours, and sculptural modeling. Unlike the looser brushwork of the Heidelberg School contemporaries, Lindsay’s paintings are highly detailed and precise, closer in style to European academic painters.
His use of light and shadow is particularly striking. Rather than painting with the dappled sunlight of Impressionism, Lindsay often employed strong contrasts, rich tonal variations, and a subtle sfumato effect (a soft blending of tones) to give his figures a three-dimensional, almost marble-like quality. This is evident in works such as Pan and Nymph (1923), where the interplay of light on skin enhances the dreamlike atmosphere.
His watercolor paintings, such as The Magic Pool (1913), show an extraordinary command of transparency and layering, creating a luminous effect that makes his figures appear ethereal and weightless.
Artistic Intent: Defiance and Escapism
Lindsay’s work was a direct rejection of realism and conservative morality, offering instead a world of unrestrained beauty, sensuality, and fantasy. He believed that art should be an escape from the mundane and the restrictive morality of his time. His fascination with classical antiquity, mythology, and Renaissance aesthetics reflected this philosophy. Lindsay is believed to have said:“The most damaging thing you can do to a child is to drum into him that a work of art is morally good or bad.”This reflects his belief that art should be free from moral constraints and societal judgment, aligning with his rejection of restrictive morality. On his fascination with classical antiquity, mythology, and Renaissance aesthetics he said: “Beauty is the greatest power in the world. Art should express it, mythology embodies it, and the Renaissance understood it.” This showcases his deep admiration for classical mythology and Renaissance aesthetics as sources of artistic inspiration.
Influences: The Old Masters and Symbolism
Lindsay was deeply influenced by the European Old Masters, particularly Peter Paul Rubens and Titian, whose fleshy, opulent figures and mythological subjects resonated with his artistic vision. The Symbolist movement, with artists like Gustave Moreau and Alphonse Mucha, also shaped his aesthetic, particularly in his ornate compositions and decorative sensibilities.
His work also bears some similarity to the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, especially Edward Burne-Jones, in its romanticism, intricate detailing, and idealized forms.
Norman Lindsay’s Place in Australian Art History
Lindsay occupies a unique position in Australian art history. While the Heidelberg School artists were focused on capturing the Australian landscape and light, Lindsay was unconcerned with national identity in his work. Instead, he created a world of escapism, rooted in European classicism but shaped by his personal artistic rebellion.
His influence can be seen in later Australian fantasy artists, and his legacy is preserved through the Norman Lindsay Gallery and Museum in Springwood, where much of his work is housed. Though controversial in his time, his mastery of form and defiance of artistic convention make him one of Australia’s most fascinating and enduring artists.
My growing appreciation for Australian art led me to study the Heidelberg School, a movement that shaped the course of landscape painting in Australia. For the first hundred years of European settlement, landscape was the dominant genre, and these artists sought to capture the essence of the land with a lightness and immediacy that set them apart.
Three of the most notable Heidelberg painters include:
• Tom Roberts (1856–1931) – One of the pioneers of Australian Impressionism, Roberts painted grand, sweeping landscapes and scenes of rural life. His masterpiece, Shearing the Rams (1890), captures the raw energy of the Australian wool industry, portraying sunlit shearers in motion, their figures illuminated by warm, golden light.
• Arthur Streeton (1867–1943) – Streeton was a master of light and atmosphere, often painting vast, sun-drenched landscapes.
• Frederick McCubbin (1855–1917) – McCubbin had a more narrative-driven approach, often depicting settlers struggling against the harsh environment. His painting The Pioneer (1904) tells a story in three panels, showing the journey of a settler family as they carve out a new life in the bush. His works are imbued with a sense of nostalgia and national identity.
These artists not only captured the Australian landscape but also helped define a national artistic identity. Their work celebrated the uniqueness of the land, with its brilliant light, vast horizons, and untamed beauty.
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“A struggle for Direction”
For me, their paintings were more than just depictions of the landscape—they were windows into a world I already knew intimately. The Heidelberg painters painted what I had experienced as a child—the golden afternoons, the distant blue hills, the quiet solitude of the bush. And in doing so, they deepened my own connection to art, nature, and the place I called home. In fact I had sat on the very rocks depicted in Streeton’s “Fires On”; viewed the trains entering the tunnel, smelt the eucalyptus Streeton would have smelt and been warmed by the hot summer sun that the artist sat in to capture the essence of this Australian scene.
I have no recollection of having any Art lessons during my primary school years—I don’t think there were any. However, I do remember my drawings occasionally being admired by teachers, while my peers often reacted with scorn, something that baffled me at the time. Whatever I knew about drawing and painting, I had taught myself.
In high school, I do recall taking Art classes. One lesson that stands out involved closely observing a pair of shoes to draw, which I found interesting, as I did with other projects assigned by the teacher. As the years went on and I moved to another school, I always chose Art as an elective since it was the subject I was best at. Yet, the lessons themselves were largely unremarkable. What I remember most were the frequent moments of frustration—classes where the teacher had no real control, and little to no actual teaching or learning took place. Occasionally, I would find myself showing a friend how to do something related to drawing or painting. Despite the shortcomings of my education, I still managed to win the occasional Art award, though they were rarely given out. Like most children and young people, I had no real reference point to recognize that something was fundamentally wrong—that my education was lacking. This wasn’t limited to Art; effective teaching was scarce across most subjects, with only occasional exceptions.
Looking back on the schooling of the 1970s and 1980s, it seems that, for many students, the system did more to teach failure than success. I managed to succeed in high school enough to gain a place at The University of New England.
Financial hardship and a lack of a real career direction forced me to moved to Sydney to earn some money. Living in Paddington at the time I visited the commercial galleries and viewed the works for sale. One notable artist was Pro Hart, a prolific painter living in the outback town of Broken Hill. I admired his colours and the recurring theme of outback life. I also found the high price attached to his work intriguing. Could I also make a living from art?
Pro Hart (1928–2006) was a renowned Australian artist celebrated for his energetic, colorful depictions of outback life,
Living close to the Art Gallery of NSW, I took full advantage of its free entry at the time, visiting frequently to study the paintings, particularly those of the Heidelberg School. One work that left a lasting impression on me was “Fires On,” which I have mentioned previously. At 19, my own artwork was already centered on the landscape.
My first formal education in Art came when I was accepted into the Art Teaching program at Sydney University (after completing my Bachelors degree- a whole other story). There, I studied painting, ceramics, and printmaking, immersing myself fully in the subject. I found the experience both inspiring and deeply enjoyable, driven by passionate teachers who encouraged my development. I excelled in my studies, earning distinctions in my grades. My teaching practice was equally rewarding, culminating in a distinction for my final teaching practicum, where I taught Art to adolescents.
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I had been driving for over five hours, with my wife and our two-year-old son in the car. The long journey had been broken only by the occasional stop to let him stretch his little legs or to brush away the ever-present dust from the windscreen. Earlier, I had hit my first kangaroo. The sickening thud still echoed in my mind. I had pulled over briefly, staring at the lifeless, bloodied, mangled form left behind on the side of the road, just another piece of “road-kill” on the harsh Australian highways. My wife had said little, sensing my unease, and we had driven on in silence.
By midday, we stopped again. The world around us felt utterly still. There were no other cars, no distant figures, no movement at all. The silence was profound, broken only by the occasional buzz of unseen insects. The sky was an almost surreal shade of turquoise, vast and unbroken, while the sun hammered down, turning the road into a furnace beneath our feet.
We were on our way to Ivanhoe, my first teaching post in a tiny railway town deep in the outback. The name itself was misleading—“Ivanhoe” conjured up images of rolling green fields, dense forests, and the romance of medieval England. The reality was far from that. Dust coated everything, flies swarmed relentlessly, and the landscape was dominated by endless stretches of sheep paddocks. The town itself was little more than a handful of buildings and a sign that proudly (or perhaps apologetically) declared the population: 100.
That number, however, was about to change. When we arrived, I took it upon myself to make an unofficial amendment. With some white paint I had in my Artist box I carefully adjusted the sign to read 103—our arrival had significantly altered the demographic landscape, after all. My wife seemed indifferent to the meaning of such an act. There was no one around to object, and the nearest authorities were a comfortable 300 kilometers away in Griffith. Bureaucracy, I figured, had no place out here.
With the revised population count standing proudly behind us, I took a deep breath of the dry, fly-ridden air. Our new life—as a teacher, and as strangers in this vast, empty land—was about to begin.
I had desperately tried to find employment as an art teacher, but the state education authority had little to offer. “You’ll be placed on a waiting list,” they told me. “It might take at least ten years before a position opens up.”
Ten years?
That was not an option. I had never been one to accept the fate others dictated for me, so I did what I had always done—I took matters into my own hands.
Determined, I made an appointment at the state education office in the Center of Sydney. When the day arrived, I sat in a small, nondescript waiting room, my hands resting on my lap, mentally preparing my case. A stern-looking woman emerged from the office. She was sharp, efficient—clearly someone who had seen a hundred applicants like me before.
“What do you teach?” she asked, glancing at the paperwork in her hands.
“Art,” I replied.
She barely concealed her reaction. A brief flick of her eyes upward, a sideways glance. You have no chance, buddy, her expression seemed to say. Without another word, she turned and disappeared back into the office.
Two minutes later, she returned. “Have you done any woodwork?” she asked, her tone neutral.
Thinking fast, I said, “Yes, I built a pine coffee table last year.”
She made a soft grunt, gave a small nod, then once again retreated into the office.
I waited. And waited.
The door opened a third time, but this time, it was a man who stepped out. His demeanor was warmer, almost friendly. “I might have a job for you,” he said with a hint of enthusiasm. “Come in, come in.” He gestured toward his office, and I followed.
Seated across from him, I listened as he explained the situation. They were struggling to find teachers, especially for remote schools. Since I was art-trained, he figured I could “adjust” to teaching Industrial Arts. Then he mentioned the town.
“Ivanhoe.” I frowned slightly. “Where exactly is Ivanhoe?”
At that, he got up and crossed the room to a huge map of New South Wales that covered the entire wall. The sheer size of the map underscored just how vast the education administrative area was—and, by extension, how massive Australia itself is.
“Ha…,” he murmured, scanning the map for the town. He hesitated, then finally pointed. From where I sat, I couldn’t even read the name—it was that small.
“Well,” I said after a moment, “I’ll take it… so long as I can teach some art.”
That was my one condition.
Within a week, my wife and I had packed up our belongings. Our two-year-old son toddled around the house, oblivious to the enormity of the change ahead. As we loaded up the car, I took one last deep breath, anticipating the start of our new life in the Australian outback.
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“Ivanhoe”
It is a truth universally acknowledged—though rarely spoken aloud in the dusty, heat-stricken towns of the Australian outback—that an eager young teacher, stepping with naïve optimism into an unfamiliar world, is in for a rather rude awakening.
Ivanhoe was no exception. The town, if one could truly call it that, bore a sign at its outskirts boldly declaring a population of one hundred. This, of course, was a lie—one of those convenient fictions maintained by road signs and government clerks. In reality, the surrounding district brought the numbers closer to five hundred, most of whom were tied to the land or the endless, rattling rail line that cut across the country like a great iron scar, stretching from Sydney to Perth. It was a working-class place, where men laboured on sheep stations, tending the vast flocks that would one day yield fine wool for city dwellers who had never set foot on red earth. The children of these families attended Ivanhoe Central School—the only school for miles—unless, of course, they were among the fortunate few whose parents could afford to send them away to be properly educated at a boarding school far to the east.
It did not take long to discover that education, in Ivanhoe, was not something particularly prized. This was a rather startling revelation. One might assume that even the most reluctant pupil could be lured into enthusiasm by the promise of something practical—woodwork, metalwork, the joy of shaping tangible things with one’s own hands. But no. The students regarded school as an obligation inflicted upon them by the government, something to be endured rather than embraced. They were disinterested, unmotivated, and, on occasion, outright mutinous. It was only in my third year that they began to accept me as their teacher, and even then, with the cautious reluctance of wild animals deciding whether a newcomer could be trusted.
It was during this time that my true fascination with ceramics took hold. The Industrial Arts syllabus—mercifully—made space for it, and I seized the opportunity. The potter’s wheel, the alchemy of glaze preparation, the mystery of the kiln—I was enthralled. To open the door of a freshly fired kiln, to see the glassy, iridescent fusion of glaze and clay, was nothing short of magic. Never mind that in Japan, a potter trained for twenty years before earning the title of master. I had neither the time nor the patience of an apprentice who, legend had it, might spend five years merely preparing clay. No, I was learning by doing, and my knowledge of glazes grew at an exhilarating pace.
With some measure of pride (and no small amount of sweat), I built a wood-fired kiln in my backyard. A colleague—one with a literary bent—dubbed it Mount Doom, no doubt envisioning its roaring flames as something lifted straight from the pages of Tolkien. It was an apt comparison. The fire within held the power to transform, to destroy, to bring forth beauty from raw earth.
Clay, after all, is among the oldest of human technologies. To shape it, to fire it, to coax something lasting from earth and flame—it is an art as ancient as civilisation itself. The oldest known ceramic vessels, some 20,000 years old, were found in China, their makers long vanished but their work enduring. Perhaps, in some small way, my students and I were joining that lineage—firing our own imperfect pots in the searing heat of the Australian outback, creating something tangible in a place where permanence was otherwise hard to come by.
The environment was unrelenting. In summer, the air shimmered with a heat that could reach 47 degrees Celsius—the hottest I recorded in my three years there. The students were difficult, their parents indifferent, and the school administration… well. One principal was an alcoholic who rarely emerged from his office, except in the last moments of the day, like some nocturnal creature reluctantly drawn into the light. His replacement was an ambitious professional, keen to climb the rungs of bureaucracy, but possessing even less experience at his job than I had at mine.
In the midst of it all, vegetables became my solace. I did not paint during those years; teaching consumed every ounce of my creative energy. But I could grow things. My garden thrived, nourished by manure collected from beneath the sheep-shearing sheds of the local stations. The sun blazed down daily, but water was plentiful, drawn through pipes from the Menindee Lakes. It was a small miracle in an otherwise barren place. Tending to the garden soothed my mind and filled my plate with something wholesome. It was, in its own way, an act of survival.
Still, I knew I could not stay. No one was meant to live in Ivanhoe for long. I applied for a transfer, craving the coast, a return to something resembling civilisation. Bureaucracy, ever efficient in its inefficiency, assigned me to the one place on the North Coast that no one else wanted—a Central School in a small town called Nimbin.
When my new principal spoke of it to a colleague, he remarked, rather too knowingly, that “he will like Nimbin.” At the time, I had no idea what he meant. Was it a simple observation, or had his words been laced with malice and amusement? I would soon learn that it was the latter.
And so, on my last day in Ivanhoe, before I left town for good, I made one final stop. Pulling up beside the roadside population sign, I scratched around the zero, erasing the faint outline of the three that had made it 103, leaving the number once again at 100. Then I climbed back into my Toyota, pressed my foot to the accelerator, and drove away without looking back.
This chapter was over.
The next adventure was waiting in Nimbin. This, my second teaching appointment was an Art teaching job.
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“Nimbin”.
With a heart pounding like the distant rumble of an approaching storm, I approached my new place of employment—a modest, freestanding structure ominously dubbed the “Bark Hut.” The name evoked images from Australian poetry, perhaps a nod to Banjo Paterson’s “The Old Bark Hut,” a ballad depicting the austere life of early settlers. Yet, as I stood before it, I couldn’t help but wonder if the moniker was a wry commentary on the building’s own rustic charm.
The hut was rumored to be constructed entirely of the now rare and precious Red Cedar. However, any trace of this esteemed timber was concealed beneath layers of government-issued white paint, each coat a testament to years of bureaucratic attempts to maintain a façade of uniformity. The Australian summer sun was already asserting its dominance, casting a warm glow over the scene as I prepared to meet my Year 9 students, a group of fifteen to sixteen-year-olds poised on the precipice of adulthood.
“Hello,” I greeted the students gathered on the steps, attempting to mask my trepidation with a veneer of confidence.
“Hello,” came the chorused reply, a mixture of curiosity and indifference coloring their tones.
“Shall we go inside?” I suggested, ushering them into the hut.
As they filed in, a blonde-haired girl fixed me with a piercing gaze. “What do you think of teachers going off on ‘power trips’?” she inquired, her question hanging in the air like a gauntlet thrown.
“Power trips?” I echoed, buying time as I processed the unexpected query. “What do you mean?”
“It’s when a teacher has no idea how to teach and relies on authority to boss students around,” she clarified, her tone unwavering.
Caught off guard by the sophistication of the question—a level of critical thinking I hadn’t encountered in my previous teaching experiences—I admitted, “I didn’t know.”
My attempt at humility was met with a cacophony of chatter as the class seized the opportunity to disengage. Students talked amongst themselves, fidgeted, gazed out the doorway and small window, their attention slipping through my fingers like sand. The meticulously prepared lesson I had envisioned was unraveling before my eyes.
Three girls joined the initial inquisitor, voicing their opinions on how I should conduct the class. All I could do was listen and nod, the authority I had hoped to wield dissolving in the face of their collective will.
“You know, we respected our last art teacher because when we first met her, she was sitting under the table waiting for us,” one of them offered, a mischievous glint in her eye.
I was at a loss. How could such an unconventional approach engender respect? Lacking context, I couldn’t fathom the efficacy of such a strategy. It became evident that these students, despite their professed desire to draw and color yet another rainbow—a likely influence from the nearby Steiner School nestled in the rainforest—had a limited understanding of art.
That evening, as I reflected on the day’s events, I realized these young people were markedly different from those I had taught in Ivanhoe. Their perspectives were shaped by the legacy of the 1973 Aquarius Festival, Australia’s answer to Woodstock—a ten-day celebration of alternative thinking and sustainable lifestyles held in Nimbin. Many of these adolescents were the offspring of the festival’s founders, intelligent people from Sydney University, conceived during an era marked by Vietnam War protests, the rise of hippie culture, flower power, and the ethos of free love. They were, in essence, the embodiment of a countercultural revolution that had unfolded while I was still a student myself, too young to partake in the movement but old enough to witness its impact on society.
The first year at Nimbin was a crucible, testing the limits of my patience and resilience. The students were resistant to learning, their respect elusive. The administrative support I had relied upon during my training was conspicuously absent. When I sought assistance from my line manager, the deputy principal overseeing the high school division, I received a terse note: “You might want to deal with this yourself.” His indifference was a harbinger of the deeper malevolence that would later reveal itself.
Thus, my inaugural year at Nimbin unfolded—a journey through a pedagogical wilderness where the traditional compass of authority and structure offered little guidance. It was a year that would leave me questioning not only my methods but the very essence of what it meant to be an educator in a landscape reshaped by the tides of cultural upheaval.
I had to find a way to be the teacher I had dreamed of being, even in these strange, shifting circumstances. These students were different—culturally, intellectually—nothing like the ones I had imagined when I set my heart on teaching Art. But it wasn’t working. Five years of study, all those late nights, all that effort—wasted. Flushed down the toilet, just like that.
But then what? What else was there for me? The thought of spending the next forty years trapped in the same suffocating, soul-draining environment was unbearable. No. That was not an option.
I had to figure it out. Somehow. Or I had to leave.
But how? That, I didn’t know. Not then.
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Epiphany.
The sun cast its relentless gaze over Nimbin, a town whose very soil seemed steeped in stories of transformation. Once a thriving hub for dairy and banana farming, Nimbin had, over the decades, become a magnet for those seeking alternative lifestyles, especially after the famed Aquarius Festival of 1973.
As I meandered through the town’s winding paths, the remnants of its eclectic past whispered from every corner. The old cheese factory, build on a meandering bend of Calico Creek, stood as a testament to Nimbin’s industrious origins. Now repurposed, its walls housed artists’ workshops and echoed with the laughter of audiences in its converted picture theatre every Friday and Saturday night.
One balmy evening, drawn by the allure of cinema, I found myself navigating the dimly lit surroundings of the theatre during intermission. The path was treacherous, especially after recent rains had turned the creek below into a roaring torrent. As I fumbled in the darkness, seeking the restroom, I nearly collided with a familiar figure emerging from the shadows.
It was her—the same audacious student who had once challenged my authority in the classroom. But here, away from the confines of school, she seemed transformed. Her earlier defiance was replaced with a radiant warmth. She smiled, her eyes reflecting genuine surprise and pleasure at our unexpected meeting.
“Fancy seeing you here,” she remarked, tucking the last of her shirt into the top of her shorts.
I managed a chuckle, still grappling with the sudden shift in our dynamic. “I enjoy the occasional film,” I replied. “It’s a welcome escape.”
We walked back towards the theatre together, our conversation light and unburdened by the usual teacher-student formalities. In that brief interaction, a revelation dawned upon me. Perhaps these students, products of a counterculture that celebrated freedom and questioned authority, required a different approach. Maybe, just maybe, by showing them kindness and understanding, by stepping down from the pedestal of authority and meeting them on common ground, I could bridge the chasm that had formed between us.
That night, as the film’s images danced across the screen, my mind was elsewhere, crafting a new vision for my role in this ever-evolving tapestry that was Nimbin.
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“I love You” ❤️
I always arrived at my Art room early. It set a good example, I told myself. But, truthfully, it was more than that—I needed the quiet before the storm. There were materials to prepare, bags of clay to slice into manageable slabs, works on paper to pin up, and—perhaps most importantly—time to mentally brace myself for the students and the lesson ahead.
Some of my colleagues failed to see the value in this. One Mathematics teacher in particular waltzed into her classes ten minutes late every single day—for thirteen years. Thirteen years. And yet she wondered why she couldn’t control her class. I think she disliked her job and wanted to spend as much time as possible away from it.
How did she get away with it? Well, she belonged to the right group, the ones who knew all the right words to say, the ones who upheld the sacred code of educational bureaucracy. In staff meetings, they spoke in fluent edu-speak, tossing around phrases like student-centered learning and holistic engagement—phrases that, in theory, sounded meaningful but, in practice, meant absolutely nothing. They championed inclusivity, adaptability, and all the latest pedagogical theories, yet somehow, none of this translated into a well-run classroom.
Meanwhile, I had my own approach.
“Good morning!” I greeted every student who walked into my room, every lesson, without fail. At first, they thought it was odd. But after a couple of weeks, they returned the greeting.
“I like red,” I remarked casually to an eighth-grade boy one morning. “It’s my favorite color. I’ve got a jumper the same shade as yours.” He stopped mid-step, processing what I’d just said, as if unused to such observations.
“You look happy today,” I’d tell another, always with genuine energy.
“Your shoes need cleaning—but hey, I like dusty shoes.”
Sometimes, I’d throw out absurd, unrelated questions just to lighten the mood. “Did everyone clean their teeth this morning?” A ridiculous question to ask a room full of sixteen-year-olds, but they knew it was tongue-in-cheek. Responses came in the form of smirks, raised eyebrows, or exaggerated gasps of mock horror.
Then there was the praise. Always honest, never forced. “Those lines are well drawn. The colors are true to life—great work. Are you happy with it? Because I am.”
Students could tell when praise was hollow. If I handed out compliments like cheap sweets, they would have known, and the whole exercise would have collapsed in on itself. But honesty—well, honesty worked. And slowly, my classroom transformed.
I gave students the freedom to plan their own projects, set their own goals—within a few broad criteria I established. They flourished under this system. I opened the Art room after school for those who wanted to continue their work, and soon, it was overflowing. Some had to spill onto the veranda outside just to find space. The so-called discipline problems that had plagued my first year and a half? They faded into a distant memory.
The students were engaged. They enjoyed what they were doing. More than that—they found it intrinsically satisfying. Endorphins buzzed in their brains. They felt good, which made them motivated, which, in turn, made my job easy. And all of this—the joy, the energy—was proof of what Art could do.
One afternoon, during a drawing lesson with my tenth-grade class, I allowed them to work on their chosen projects. The syllabus wasn’t externally examined, which meant I had the freedom to let them explore, to keep my instructions minimal so I could move around the room and provide individual guidance.
Sometimes, I simply let the class settle into silent running, allowing their minds to slip into the quiet, meditative state that real creative engagement required. The Art room hummed with concentration. I withdrew to my desk—untidy as always, cluttered with books, papers, and the occasional stray paintbrush.
That was when I saw it.
A small, folded piece of red paper. It hadn’t been there ten minutes ago.
Curious, I reached for it and unfolded it.
“I love you.”
That was all. No name. No embellishment. Just those three words, accompanied by a small, hand-drawn heart.
I sat for a moment, staring at it, my mind whirring in a dozen directions at once.
This was new. In all the situations I had faced as an Art teacher—temper tantrums, creative blocks, students who had melted down over a misplaced brushstroke—this was something else entirely.
What was this? Admiration? A joke? Love?
I exhaled slowly and slipped the note into my pocket, instinct taking over. That was a mistake. I should have tossed it in the bin right then and there. Instead, I had taken it with me, as though the simple act of pocketing it had made it my responsibility.
Meanwhile, the classroom continued as if nothing had happened. The students, deep in their work, were oblivious to the tiny storm brewing behind the teacher’s desk.
And now, the question loomed: what to do next?
*********************
“Art Room Success “
Word of my Art room’s newfound success began to ripple through parts of the community. Not everyone noticed, of course—certainly not those in charge—but among some parents, especially those who were artists themselves, a quiet enthusiasm took root.
Some wanted to see what their children were doing, curiosity getting the better of them. Others—possessing skills in painting, sculpture, or printmaking—offered to share their expertise, eager to contribute. I welcomed them all.
One mother, a ceramic sculptor, writer and poet, inspired both my students and me with her skill in clay portraits. Under her guidance, the students’ work took on new life, shifting from simple forms to sharp, exaggerated caricatures of the human face—lips curled in knowing grins, brows arched in suspicion, noses hooked like question marks. The room buzzed with energy, the air thick with the smell of damp clay and ambition.
This work, along with so much else, was showcased in the Nimbin Arts and Crafts Exhibition—an annual event I ran for years, partly to highlight my students’ achievements, partly to draw local artists into the school. Their involvement brought press coverage, positive stories in the local newspapers, nods of approval from the right people. It was a small victory.
There were other projects, too—competitions where winners took home everything from art supplies to, on one occasion, a computer; mural projects for which we somehow scraped together funding; collaborations with student teachers eager to learn how to actually run an Art class, as opposed to what they were told in theory.
I started a film course. I brought in visiting artists. I established a darkroom and introduced photography into the curriculum. And all of this ran alongside the foundation of the program—drawing, painting, printmaking, and ceramics.
Meanwhile, my own art flourished. I made a point of working alongside my students, allowing them to see my process, to understand that creation wasn’t magic but a craft—something built, layer by layer, mistake by mistake. In turn, they found meaning in their own work by studying mine. Inspiration, after all, was a two-way street.
And yet, none of this seemed to register with the administrators.
Not once did they acknowledge the energy in my classroom, the passion, the long afternoons spent with students who didn’t have to be there but wanted to be. No encouragement. No acknowledgment. Nothing.
A few kind words would have made all the difference.
Over time, I found myself drawn to a small group of like-minded colleagues—fellow teachers who, like me, had become disillusioned with the bureaucracy, with the endless meetings filled with empty words, with the feeling that we were working in spite of, rather than with, the system. ( I imaged that the schools bureaucracy would think we were as evil as The Gang of Four, in Chinese modern history, well I liked to think we had such power but without the evil)
There were four of us. In a small school, four was enough to form a resistance.
We escaped, whenever we could, to Rick’s Café—a small, unassuming spot on the main street of Nimbin, right next to the famous Rainbow Café, which had once been a landmark before it burned to the ground. The Rainbow Café had been a relic of the original Aquarius Festival, a magnet for wandering souls. Rick’s, by contrast, was conservative in decor, less of a shrine to the past and more of a quiet retreat.
Not that we cared about the décor. It was the hamburgers we came for.
Even in the thick of the wet season, when reaching the café meant wading through ankle-deep puddles, we went.
Conversations had to be short as we only had twenty minutes to order and eat our burgers. But we often spoke about: philosophy, travel, relationships, the land, what we were building on our own properties (for we all had them, scattered throughout the valley). The others commuted from larger towns, a daily journey I found to be a tragic waste of time. I, on the other hand, was in the process of building my own house north of Nimbin, on the side of Blue Knob—with my own hands.
These were good days. Days of support, camaraderie, of feeling that, despite everything, we had carved out a space for ourselves.
But nothing stays the same.
Not because we wanted it to change.
But because, slowly, inexorably, something unseen, something insidious, began to shift the world around us.
****************************************
“The Lolita Effect “
My rapport with the students at least now remained strong. At times, this connection manifested itself in innocent gestures: a fleeting touch on the arm, a spontaneous embrace, the careless ease with which they leaned too close, oblivious—or perhaps not—to the boundaries of propriety. These gestures, I told myself, were simple acts of human warmth, and yet there were instances when something else flickered beneath the surface, something more complex, more charged with the electricity of ambiguity. A leg brushing against mine under the table, the slow, deliberate gaze that lingered a moment too long, eyes searching mine with an expectant, inarticulate question.
I remember one afternoon, the sunlight thick as honey through the high windows, warming the wooden frames, gilding the edges of the classroom’s worn furniture. I had been leaning from the window, speaking absently to a student outside, when suddenly, without hesitation, she leaned into me, pressing the length of her body against mine, as much as the space would allow. For an instant, I remained still, caught in that strange paralysis of indecision where the mind, though fully aware, seems reluctant to act, as though unwilling to disturb the delicate balance of the moment. I ought to have stepped away more swiftly, to have reestablished the distance that was, after all, not only expected but necessary. Yet, there I leaned feeling her weight against me, before finally shifting- pushing with my arms and hands against the window sill so that we both moved back to a standing position. This had the effect of making her stand independent of me and therefore her body no longer had contact with mine.
She met my gaze, searchingly, as if waiting for words that did not come. I remained silent, and she, too, said nothing. The moment passed, dissolved into the quiet hum of the afternoon, yet it remained with me long after, resurfacing in odd moments, much like those peculiar and seemingly insignificant details of childhood—an old perfume, the scent of rain on pavement—that persist in memory with inexplicable force.
Had I misread something? Or had she? And yet, I knew that the novel I had once read—the novel that, in its time, had been condemned, suppressed, and misunderstood—spoke of just such moments: moments where power shifted in ways that could not be clearly defined, where one was no longer sure who was leading and who was merely following a path already laid before them. If Lolita ensnared, it was because Humbert allowed himself to be ensnared, his weakness lying not in his inclinations, but in his inability to resist them.
But I was not he, nor was she a literary invention. She was simply a girl, sixteen years old, no longer a child, not yet a woman, caught in the tides of her own unformed desires, testing the boundaries of what was permissible, what was possible. And I—despite whatever stirrings of unease or sentiment—was a teacher, a man bound by role and reason, aware that even the gentlest misstep could unravel into something that neither of us fully understood.
Perhaps I should have spoken then. Said something that would close the door gently, but firmly, on the ambiguity that hung between us. But I did not, and so the moment remained—a fragment of time, preserved in memory, drifting there still like a petal caught in a stream, turning, eddying, before vanishing into the depths of the past. Or did it?
“Butterfly Effect”.
It was in those days—those feverish, ungovernable days, when the air of the staffroom seemed thick with a tension that one might have cut with the same precision as a potter’s wire slicing through yielding clay—that I first found myself reflecting on the curious phenomenon known as the Butterfly Effect. It was, of course, a term borrowed from meteorology, a science in which the most infinitesimal disturbance—a moth’s wing flickering against the still air, a breath whispered in a hollow corridor—might unravel into a hurricane. I remember thinking that such a theory must surely have been conceived by an artist rather than a scientist, for it was too poetic, too preposterously beautiful, to belong to the cold arithmetic of physics. And yet, as I stood at my wheel, hands slick with slip, my students gathered around with expressions of concentration so fierce they bordered on reverence, I saw how true it was—not in the skies above, but in the confined and fevered atmosphere of our school.
There had always been a growing divide, a subtle yet inexorable fault line, between the factions of our teaching staff. It would be naïve to imagine that our group, those of us who spent our lunchtimes in Rick’s Café beneath the slow-turning fans, speaking of art and philosophy between mouthfuls of hamburgers, were not observed—resented, even—by those who clung to the rigid hierarchies of our profession. A school, after all, is nothing if not a microcosm of the world, its politics played out in miniature. And there, within our miniature world, we had our own exiles and revolutionaries, our bureaucrats and our rebels, our judges and our condemned.
One among us, a man of considerable experience, had come from Adelaide, where he had once been the deputy master of a large school—a man whose knowledge and expertise might, in a different institution, have been welcomed, harnessed, even revered. But here, where the ruling class was less concerned with excellence than with allegiance, he remained unheard. It was not what was said that mattered, but who had said it. And thus, the solutions we proposed—elegant, pragmatic, brimming with the common sense of those who had truly learned their craft—were dismissed, not because they lacked merit, but because they came from the wrong mouths. I was the youngest in the group. I however learned a great deal from this man.
I think of that now, but at the time, my mind was elsewhere, wholly occupied with the delicate and treacherous business of teaching my students to throw clay. To a casual observer, it might have seemed a simple task—after all, what could be easier than shaping soft earth between one’s hands? But in truth, it was among the most difficult of artistic endeavours. The wheel turned with its own centrifugal will, resisting the clumsy insistence of untrained fingers, sending malformed lumps flying, punishing impatience with collapse. It was a discipline of control and surrender, of knowing when to force and when to yield, of moving in perfect harmony with the rotation of the world. I had devised a way to make it easier, a method that allowed even beginners to find some small success, and my students were engaged, absorbed in that peculiar rapture that comes with creation.
And then she entered.
She did not knock, nor pause at the threshold to ask permission. She moved as though the space were hers to command, her presence a silent but undeniable proclamation of her authority. A colleague—though the word felt inadequate—one of those who belonged, irrevocably, to the other camp. She did not acknowledge me, nor the work I was doing, but went instead to one of my students, speaking in a voice too soft for me to catch, though the air between them carried an unmistakable air of condescension. And then—almost absently, as though it were a thing of no consequence—she murmured something about how “fun” it must be to play with clay.
I felt the heat rise in my chest, the slow, smouldering anger that comes not from insult alone, but from the knowledge that it will go unpunished. My students, mercifully, did not hear her words; they were too lost in their work. But I heard. And it was enough.
I do not remember the lesson ending, only that at some point, I found myself alone, the room still bearing the faint, damp smell of worked clay, the wheels silent, the scattered remnants of my students’ efforts drying in the open air. The rage had not left me. It sat coiled within me, not the fleeting fire of a moment’s temper, but the slow, consuming heat of something more dangerous—something that required action.
And so, in the quiet that followed, I went to her desk.
I did not overturn it, nor damage a single thing. Instead, with the careful, deliberate touch of a sculptor shaping his clay, I removed each book, each paper, each small, self-important item, and placed them, one by one, upon the floor. A desk, after all, was a symbol of power, of dominion over a space. To strip it bare, to render it as nothing more than an empty shell, was a kind of revolution in itself.
I would like to say that it was a moment of satisfaction, that I felt something lift from my shoulders as I surveyed my quiet act of rebellion. But of course, the storm was only beginning. I was, inevitably, called to account—not she, whose words had undermined my work, whose presence had dismissed my craft as a game, but I, who had dared to defy the silent laws of the school’s unwritten hierarchy. She was defended. I was condemned. It was, I thought, a law as immutable as gravity.
And yet, in the end, it was not the butterfly’s wing that stirred the air, but something much larger, much more monstrous. The dragon had risen, and the storm had only just begun.
*************************
“Chloe”
Nimbin, the valley of rain and dreams, shimmered like a vision half-remembered from childhood, a place suspended between the luminous and the damp, where time did not so much move forward as swirl in eddies, caught in the currents of mist that rose, restless, from the sodden earth.
The town was held in the palm of the hills, a landscape forever caught in the delicate balance between rain and sun, moisture and fire. The forest—dense, untamed—clutched at the ridges with long, gnarled fingers, its canopy trembling under the weight of daily downpours. The eucalypts, impossibly tall, stood in solemn congress with the sky, their trunks still whispering of the men who had felled their ancestors, their roots tangled in the history of an industry that had once sent red cedar—a wood of such rare quality that the very mention of its name conjured images of fine furniture in the grand homes of distant cities—south to Melbourne, north to Brisbane, out beyond the reach of the valley’s enclosing arms.
It was here, in this place where rainbows did not so much appear as perpetually linger—refractions of light playing in the endless interplay of sun and passing storms—that I lived and taught. There was an inevitability to my presence here, as if I had wandered into a dream already half-dreamt, a landscape preordained to be the backdrop for whatever small drama my own existence would enact.
The school, with its damp walls and persistent scent of wet earth, was both sanctuary and stage, and my classroom, filled with the heady smell of turpentine and wet clay, was the intimate theatre where the small but significant tragedies of adolescence played out. I was there, as always, engaged in the quiet rituals of preparation—arranging jars of paint, smoothing sheets of drawing paper—when she entered.
A Grade 10 student. Alone.
She hesitated, as if at the threshold of something greater than a room, moving slowly along the edge of a table before seating herself on a stool at the far end, her posture neither confrontational nor casual but imbued with the weight of what she had come to say.
“Hello,” I said.
“Hello,” she answered.
There was a pause, a stretching of the moment into something almost tactile.
“What can I do for you?” I asked.
She looked at me then, not with the bright, expectant eyes of a student about to ask a question on technique or materials, but with a quiet determination, the sort of expression that belongs not to children, nor even to adults, but to those caught in the painful transition between the two.
“I have to tell you something.”
Another pause, another moment drawn long and thin between us.
“Yes?”
She glanced down, her fingers tracing absent patterns on the wooden table. And then:
“Chloe is desperately in love with you.”
The words, once spoken, did not dissolve into the air but hung there, suspended, like the raindrops that clung to leaves after a storm.
I did not speak. I let them settle around us, altering the very pressure of the room.
I do not know how long we remained like that, looking at one another, acknowledging the enormity of what had just been said without moving towards or away from it. Finally, I exhaled, asked, as gently as I could:
“How do you know this?”
“She told me. We’re friends. She’s been in love with you for a long time. And I wanted to tell you because I know she won’t.”
She was brave, I thought. To say such a thing. To place it, like an offering, between us.
“You are a teacher, I know,” she added.
“Yes,” I said.
Nothing more.
She seemed to shrink then, not out of regret, but out of the relief that comes from having unburdened oneself of a great weight. She rose, moved toward the door, her retreat as quiet as her arrival.
The afternoon arrived, and with it, Chloe’s class. She entered with the others, and for the briefest moment, our eyes met. A flicker of recognition—acknowledgment, embarrassment, sorrow. And then she looked away, and did not look again for the rest of the lesson.
I, too, avoided her.
She must have wondered why.
Perhaps she had imagined something else. A conversation. A moment of clarity. But I, caught between the moral imperative of my role and the fragile emotions of a girl in love, had found myself unable to bridge the chasm that now separated us.
She left with the others. We had not spoken.
The next day, I found her alone, sitting atop a school bench beneath the vast, spreading limbs of a fig tree, its roots gnarled and exposed, clinging to the earth as though bracing against the rain.
“We need to talk,” I said.
She looked up, her expression unreadable.
“Let’s meet this afternoon,” I continued, “at the back gate. We can walk to the pool. We can talk there.”
A pause. A breath.
“Yes, okay.”
That was all.
And so we met.
We walked without speaking, following the familiar path: across the small road, down the short flight of stairs beneath the jacaranda, its blossoms—brilliant and delicate—falling unnoticed around us, pooling in the cracks of the pavement like a spilled memory.
Down another set of stairs, past the laurel tree, onto the soccer field.
Still, we did not speak.
I was searching for the right words. She, perhaps, was searching for an answer that could not be given.
At the pool, we sat opposite each other at the wooden table, a barrier of sorts between us.
Chloe finally spoke.
“You know,” she said.
I nodded.
She looked at me, then looked down, her fingers trailing over the weathered surface of the table.
I tried to speak gently, carefully, as one does when handling something delicate.
“I’m your teacher,” I said. “I cannot go out with you. I cannot see you.”
“But couldn’t we just meet?” she asked. “For a drink? Something to eat?”
I shook my head.
“That wouldn’t be a good idea.”
The words were insufficient, incapable of containing the full weight of what I meant, what I felt, what had to be understood.
We repeated ourselves, circling the same sentences as though they might, at some point, transform into something softer, something kinder.
Finally, I stood.
“We should go back,” I said. “I don’t want people seeing us here.”
As we climbed the stairs, she stopped. She held out her hands, palms up.
“You see?” she said.
Her hands were red—flushed, burning.
“What is that?” I asked.
“It’s a stress rash,” she said.
I had never seen such a thing before.
“I’m sorry,” I murmured.
I suppose I broke her heart, whatever that means.
In the weeks that followed, the air in my classroom grew heavy with tension. Chloe did not speak to me, but her presence became something jagged, a disruption in the rhythm of the class.
The rain continued to fall. The rainforest grew wild and tangled. The world turned, unchanged.
And yet, something had shifted. Something unseen, but irreversibly altered.
I was twenty-six. Still young, yet old enough to know the weight of consequence, the silent edicts that governed desire, the unspoken laws that separated a fleeting temptation from an irretrievable mistake. And yet, as Chloe’s confession settled into my consciousness, I could not help but feel a quiet stirring—not merely of vanity, though surely there was that, but of something more primal, more unsettling. It is in the nature of all human beings to wish to be desired, to have the gaze of another rest upon them with longing, to be, for even a moment, the object of someone’s unguarded affection. I was no exception.
Yet the mind is a master of contradiction. Even as I told her what must be said—that there could be nothing between us, that the world had drawn an indelible line between teacher and student, between a man and a girl just stepping across the threshold of womanhood—another part of me, some ancient whisper of instinct, wondered. In another time, in another world, free of these particular rules, would I have entertained her? Would I, untethered from the rigid structures of my role, have accepted what she so earnestly, so naively, offered?
There was a time—through much of human history, in fact—when such distinctions were not so sharply drawn, when sixteen was not the fragile thing it has become in our modern conscience, but a gateway, an age of betrothal and solemn vows, of love not weighed down by the moral caution of later generations. Even now, in distant lands, in cultures untouched by the particular scruples of the West, a girl of Chloe’s age might already be a wife, a mother, her desires not dismissed as childish, but honored as natural. But times change, and what once was ordinary is now viewed through a new lens, reframed not as possibility but as transgression, not as love but as peril.
Perhaps it is better this way. The old ways were not always kind. For all their freedoms, they held their own cruelties, their own burdens placed unfairly upon young women. No longer are they bartered away in arrangements not of their making, or given to men decades their senior out of duty rather than desire. Now they choose. Now they wait, if they wish, until life has granted them experience enough to make their own decisions with certainty.
And yet, for all this progress, something was lost too. The so-called “free love” of the generation just before mine, the reckless pursuit of passion untamed by convention, proved to be a fleeting illusion, an era that burned bright and vanished, leaving in its wake the same rules, the same constraints, only now in a different form.
As I looked at Chloe, at the unguarded hope in her expression, I understood the cruel paradox of it all: she was old enough to feel deeply, to love sincerely, yet too young, in the eyes of the world, to be taken seriously. And I, for all my own youth, was bound by a role I could not break.
So I did what I had to do. I let the moment pass. I did not reach across the space between us. I did not entertain what might have been in another world, another life. I simply walked away, carrying the weight of both her sorrow and my own.
And as for the note written on red paper? It was written by another.
The year was one month from finishing. It was 1986.
*************************
“A deteriorating situation”
The years, as they often do, continued their inexorable march, each one slipping silently into the past, a river of time that no longer seemed to run as smoothly as it had once done. I had not, at first, grasped the full weight of what was occurring, a slow unraveling whose first tremors were invisible to me. There was no single, immediate moment of revelation, no sharp crack that could have marked the beginning of the disintegration. Instead, it was the accretion of small, insidious changes, like the gradual wear of stone by the ceaseless pressure of water. What had once seemed an amicable, cooperative environment was now mired in a deepening malaise. It was not only the rifts between the teaching staff—this was merely the surface. Beneath, there was something more—something larger, something more elemental. The students, too, had begun to change, not all of them, but enough to be noticed. It was in their eyes, the subtle shift that betrayed an unspoken awareness. They were not blind to the shifting dynamics. They knew. They could sense the difference between the teachers who genuinely cared, who spoke to them not as if they were mere receptacles for knowledge, but as human beings with potential, with thoughts of their own. These were the teachers to whom the students naturally gravitated, those whose words, even if modest, had weight and meaning for the students. And so, the classes they enjoyed—ours, naturally—became more than mere lessons; they were portals to a kind of intellectual freedom, a space where learning was not an imposition, but a revelation. But other classes, those with teachers who did not seem to care, whose words were hollow and whose expectations seemed arbitrary, those classes became prisons. In rebellion, the students did what students do when they are pushed to the edge: they resisted. They made their discontent known, finding solace in detention, in confrontation, in the chaos of noncompliance. And the teachers, weary and defeated, retreated further into their own bitterness.
It was not hard to imagine the resentment that must have festered in these teachers, the humiliation of being so starkly compared to colleagues they despised. It was a simple truth that, in the face of such comparison, they had nothing to offer but retaliation. Their anger was directed not at the students, who, after all, were simply following their instincts, but at the very system they had to uphold. The deepening hostility between us—those of us who had managed to carve out a space of respect and mutual appreciation—was palpable. We came to refer to ourselves with a kind of bitter irony as the “Gang of Four,” a title that was as much a joke as it was a defense against the slings and arrows of those who opposed us. In truth, there were no victories, only the slow and painful erosion of any semblance of peace.
And yet, it would be wrong to say that we were entirely without support. There were those who, though quietly and in their own ways, saw what we were doing, what we were trying to achieve. But these voices were few and easily silenced. The bureaucrats, as always, maintained their stranglehold, their control, their ability to shape the narrative. One of their tactics was to dispatch a so-called expert—a person who was, in truth, neither an expert nor someone who had the slightest understanding of what it meant to teach art. Her credentials, I later discovered, were not worth the paper on which they were printed. She was there to observe, to report back to the higher-ups, to feed them the information they wanted to hear, the narrative that fit their agenda. She knew nothing of the art of teaching, of the delicate balance between encouragement and discipline, of the myriad techniques required to unlock a student’s creative potential. What she did know, however, was how to pander to those in power. She reported back with the false assurances that those in authority longed to hear, reinforcing their worldview and confirming their suspicions, while the reality of what was happening in the classrooms remained unspoken, untold.
And so, the reports piled up—false, exaggerated, and deeply damaging. Lies, misinformation, half-truths, all designed to undermine what we had spent so long building. The objective was clear: we had to be removed. Our methods, our beliefs, our very presence was an affront to the smooth functioning of the bureaucracy, to the sanitized vision of what education should look like. They would have us gone, erased, replaced with those who would follow orders without question. But we, though perhaps not ideal colleagues, had something they could not touch: the respect of the students, and the knowledge that we had tenure, the safety net that rendered our removal a more difficult, more cumbersome task. We were staying, for better or worse.
And so the storm continued to rage, its winds howling through the narrow halls of bureaucracy, its path strewn with the detritus of ambition, pride, and frustration. The school, a microcosm of a larger, more relentless world, turned inward, each side digging in deeper, the chasm widening with every passing day. In the end, it was not the butterfly that stirred the winds; it was a far more brutal force, a dragon, perhaps, breathing fire into the fragile walls that separated us all. The storm, for all its fury, showed no sign of abating.
************************
“Severe Personality Disorder “.
The weight of the situation descended upon me slowly, inexorably, as if the passage of time itself had conspired to wrap me in an unyielding web of bureaucratic cruelty. I found myself seated in a nondescript waiting room, the hum of idle conversations and the rustle of newspapers forming a strange, almost surreal backdrop to my thoughts. There were others there—some reading, others conversing—each lost in their own world, their own reasons for being there. But I, for reasons I scarcely understood myself, was handed a document and told to fill out what seemed like an endless series of pages. Fifteen, to be precise. Fifteen pages of questions, some innocuous, others probing, all designed to uncover something, to reveal something hidden within the folds of my mind. A psychological test, the likes of which I had seen during my studies at the University of New England, a distant memory now, but one that surfaced with unsettling clarity in this moment.
I was given no pen—no simple courtesy of the bureaucratic world—and so, using my own, I began the tedious task. A psychological analysis, a test that felt less like an examination of my mental state and more like a prelude to an inevitable verdict. The flight from the Gold Coast had been short, but its purpose was far more weighty: to placate a bureaucracy that had devised yet another cruel and convoluted scheme to remove me from my position. This, I understood all too well.
As I sat there, clipboard in hand, pencil poised, I glanced around the room. The distractions were overwhelming. Conversations fluttered around me like ghostly whispers, each one a reminder that this was not an environment suited to a serious test. The conditions were far from ideal. The future of my career—perhaps my very sense of self—was being determined in this sterile, yet strangely chaotic room. The questions on the page, however, were no less harrowing in their simplicity. They repeated themselves like a silent drumbeat, probing the very nature of my mind, testing for consistency in my answers. It was a mechanism, a tool of evaluation, and the message was clear: deviate, and something was wrong with you. In this system, the very act of human contradiction was a symptom of disorder. I, of course, did not intend to comply. I gave them the answers they wanted, the answers they expected, the answers that would ensure I was not found wanting—after all, I had to protect myself. If they found me “deficient,” I was well aware that I would be ushered out of my job with the cold efficiency of a bureaucratic edict.
But the test itself, the very act of submitting to it, felt like a personal defeat. I could not escape the sense that the path I had carved out for myself, the teaching I had so loved, was slipping from my grasp. And it was not just me. There were others—teachers like me—whose spirits had begun to fray under the weight of the same forces. The atmosphere in the school had become one of palpable tension, a creeping malaise that took root in the hearts of all who still cared. Each of us had our own story to tell, but in the end, the effect was the same: we were all being slowly suffocated by a system that no longer valued what we did, or who we were.
As I struggled to concentrate on the questions, the room around me seemed to close in, the noise of the outside world drifting in like an unwelcome breeze. The comings and goings of people in the hallways, the incessant shuffle of feet, all these things only served to heighten my sense of distraction. The purpose of the test seemed further and further away, its meaning slipping from my grasp like water between my fingers. On three separate occasions, the examiner—a figure whose very presence seemed to embody the bureaucratic cruelty that had led me here—interrupted my focus with sharp, impatient queries. “How much longer?” she demanded, her tone sharp, her words laced with a cruelty that was completely uncalled for. I could not help but feel that the conditions under which I was being tested were far from neutral; they were designed to break me, to force me into submission, to render me incapable of defending myself.
Nevertheless, I completed the test, handed it in, and made my way back to Nimbin, the weight of the day still hanging heavy on my shoulders.
A week later, I received a letter from the health department. The letter had nothing to do with health, of course, but it carried a message that was as cold and clinical as the system that had birthed it. I opened it, my heart sinking as I read the words, and then, there it was—the diagnosis. “Severe Personality Disorder.” Three words that, in their stark simplicity, carried the weight of a thousand judgments.
Who was I to refute this diagnosis? Who was I to challenge the wisdom of a system that had the authority of 200 years of psychiatry behind it, that had birthed minds like Freud and Jung, who had dedicated their lives to unlocking the mysteries of the human mind? I was no match for that. My own feelings of confusion, my own attempts to understand, felt so small in the face of such institutional power. I was caught between the clinical detachment of the diagnosis and the very real, very personal destruction it threatened.
And so, the next day, as I stood in the classroom, supervising my students as they worked on their art—crafting pots on the wheel, creating sculptures—I was handed a note. It was a warm summer’s day, and the sunlight filtered through the windows, casting long shadows across the room. The note read: “Please come to the office.”
I trusted my students to continue their work, told them I would be back in a moment. The office, when I arrived, was as cold and sterile as always. The secretary looked up at me, her face impassive. “I have a letter here,” she said, her voice devoid of any warmth. “It says you’re no longer able to return to your class.”
The words hit me like a punch to the gut. “So you want me to leave my class unsupervised?” I asked, my voice shaking with a mixture of disbelief and anger. “You want me to leave them in a situation that might endanger their health and safety?”
“Yes,” she replied, a simple word that sealed my fate.
And that was it. My career, the job that had given me such fulfillment, that had brought me joy in ways I had never expected, was over. Thirteen years of teaching, of sharing my passion for art with students, of seeing their creativity bloom before my eyes—gone, just like that. Ironically, many of those who had stayed—those who had kept their jobs—were the ones who were despised by the students, the ones with questionable motives, the ones who had no passion for teaching at all. The ones who had never truly understood what it meant to nurture a young mind.
And yet, I could not help but wonder: What had I really lost? My job? My position? Perhaps. But I had lost something much more valuable—the ability to continue doing what I loved, in the way that I believed was right. It was, in its own way, a loss that would take much longer to understand.
****************
“Escape to England”
The house, that perpetual monument to both my aspirations and my delays, stood incomplete, a testament to thirteen years of toil interwoven with my life as a teacher at Nimbin Central School. In those final months before my departure, I labored over the neglected details—the architraves, long left unfinished, the ceilings awaiting their final coat of paint, the gutters choked with leaves that had settled over seasons of indifference. The rock wall, that slow-growing edifice of patience, still needed tending, and the wooden trimmings, half-fixed, half-forgotten, bore silent witness to my reluctance to let anything be truly finished. Yet no matter how much I busied myself with these physical tasks, the greater weight remained: the school, the students, the relentless atmosphere of failure and hostility that had, over the years, pressed itself into my very being, until the need to escape became not a desire but an inevitability.
It was not that I longed for the routine from which I had been forcibly severed—far from it. What unsettled me was the void that had replaced it, the stripping away of that daily struggle which, despite its brutality, had given my existence a shape, a meaning, however grim. My faith in humanity, once tenuous, had now been all but extinguished. The students I once cherished—those bright, articulate young minds I had the privilege to teach in my early years—had been replaced by others, children shaped not by curiosity or ambition but by a lineage of deprivation, by the weight of lives that had already been discarded by society before they had even begun. Among them were drug dealers, prostitutes, petty criminals, the sons and daughters of those who had known no other way of being, whose resignation to fate was so absolute that it had settled into their very expressions, their posture, their unwillingness to lift their eyes from the desks they defaced with knives and ink. I could not blame them. Yet, equally, I could no longer bear to remain among them.
And so I left. England, that distant country of my ancestors, seemed as far as one could go, a land of familiar language yet foreign history, a place where I might disappear and, in disappearing, find something new. My father’s parents had been English—I recalled the accents of my childhood, their voices still marked by the cadences of a country I had never known—but whether the rest of my lineage traced its way through the convict ships or the free settlers, I neither knew nor cared. What mattered was that England, by virtue of law and blood, would allow me to stay.
But England, too, would reveal its disappointments, and soon. There were no teaching positions in the enclaves of privilege, where education was cherished and learning was an art. The jobs that fell to me were the ones abandoned by the local teachers, positions in places so forsaken that even those born and raised in England would not set foot in them. The government, in its quiet desperation, relied on those of us from across the seas—Australians, New Zealanders, South Africans—to fill these gaps, to step into the classrooms that had already been resigned to chaos. These were the schools of the working class, and their students, like the ones I had left behind in Australia, had long since absorbed the lesson that education was a farce, a thing that existed for others but not for them. Their parents, who had themselves gained nothing from schooling, saw no reason why their children should suffer through it.
And so I found myself in classrooms where learning was a perpetual battle, where my presence was tolerated at best and openly defied at worst. For nearly a year, I drifted through the school system, a substitute teacher in an endless rotation, called in to stand before rooms of restless children whose resentment of authority, of structure, of the very idea of knowledge itself, was absolute.
There was, however, one position that remains vivid in my memory: an art teaching post at a high school. Not memorable for any joy it brought me, but for the particular bleakness it revealed. These students, adolescents so disillusioned that even the promise of free expression could not rouse them from their indifference, regarded the subject with utter contempt. Their disdain was not limited to art—it extended to every subject, every teacher, every attempt at engagement. In this place, I was not so much a teacher as a figure to be tolerated, a temporary obstruction in their otherwise uninterrupted march toward adulthood unencumbered by knowledge.
The head of the art department, in a gesture both selfish and pragmatic, had arranged matters so that he would teach only the older students, those whose apathy was at least accompanied by the ability to sit silently through a lesson. The younger years, more volatile, more openly defiant, were left to the foreigner.
The curriculum—if such a word could be used—was an insult to both art and education. The students were to spend the entire term drawing bottles. Three bottles. No variation, no exploration, no expansion. Three bottles, arranged in the same way, drawn again and again, until all life and curiosity had been wrung from the task. I could not abide it. I assigned them alternatives—projects that required thought, engagement, personal interest. And in doing so, I unwittingly committed an unforgivable crime.
One boy, loud and unruly, accustomed to disrupting every lesson with his antics, was startled when I did not dismiss his suggestion out of hand. “I want to draw South Park characters,” he declared, expecting, I suppose, to provoke outrage. Instead, I nodded. “That’s a good idea,” I said. His eyes widened. For the first time, he applied himself to his work, pencil moving across the paper with something resembling focus. The others followed suit, choosing their own subjects, finding, perhaps for the first time, some connection between the act of drawing and their own lives. The room, once a place of noise and resistance, fell quiet. The quiet, I later realized, was my undoing.
The head of the department, alerted by the unnatural absence of chaos, arrived unannounced. His eyes scanned the room, searching for the bottles. They were not there. He turned to me, his Essex-accented voice sharp with accusation. “Where are the bottles?”
“We’re not drawing bottles,” I said simply.
The students, sensing the shift in atmosphere, glanced up from their work. A few, perhaps emboldened by the brief taste of freedom, smirked. The head of the department, his face darkening, turned on his heel and left without another word.
That afternoon, a message arrived: I was to report to the principal’s office at 3:30.
The principal, a man whose existence I had barely registered until that moment, wasted no time. “I have to let you go,” he said.
“Why?”
“The head of the art department says you’re not drawing bottles.”
For a moment, I could only stare at him, caught between disbelief and the absurdity of the situation. “Drawing bottles,” I repeated. “For four months?”
He shifted in his seat, discomfort creeping into his expression. “That’s the program,” he muttered.
“The program is meaningless,” I said. “It’s outdated. The students hate it. They were engaged for the first time in their lives, and you—”
He cut me off with a sigh, already tired of the conversation. “I’m sorry. I have to let you go.”
There was nothing more to say. I stood, turned, and left.
As I walked out of the school gates, I did not feel anger, nor even sorrow. I felt, instead, a kind of weary inevitability. It had never been a question of my ability, nor of the students’ potential. It had always been about control, about a system so rigid and devoid of imagination that any deviation—no matter how beneficial—was met with swift eradication.
I would not remain in England. I had no reason to. I had not painted. I had not taught in any meaningful way. There was no purpose, no future here.
I would return to Australia.
*****************************
“Thailand: A Journey of Art and Teaching”
Fate, as it often does, led me to a place wholly unexpected, a land where I found myself not only caring for a child but also, once again, immersed in the thing I loved most—teaching art. The story of my child, that tale of life and circumstance, is for another time. For now, this is the story of an art teacher, and of art, that noble pursuit that had long defined my existence.
It all began with an email. Jack, one of the old guard and the “Gang of Four” reached out, offering me an art teaching job at the international school in Chiang Mai. The offer was simple, almost too simple. “You can have it if you want,” he wrote. At the time, my mind was occupied with the challenges of parenting alone after the dissolution of my second marriage, and my initial response was swift and definitive: “No.” But, as with many things in life, time and reflection often reveal other possibilities. A few days later, weighed by the strain of my circumstances, I wrote back, “I’ll be there next week.”
Chiang Mai, nestled in the northern part of Thailand, was an unlikely destination for someone like me, yet it became my new reality. A bustling tourist hub and farming district, Chiang Mai also had a thriving expatriate community, many of whom had sent their children to international schools. The children I would teach came from families who valued education and art—families whose parents worked as missionaries, professionals, or business owners. My young child was cared for by a local Thai woman, a mother of a girl the same age. This allowed me the freedom to return to the classroom, to engage with young minds and do what I had always done best: teach art.
What struck me most about the students was their curiosity and ease. After the tumultuous years of teaching adolescents in Nimbin, where tension between students and staff had become almost palpable, these children were a refreshing change. They were polite, respectful, and motivated. Unlike the disengaged teens I had worked with in Australia, these young minds were receptive to the creative process, eager to explore the world of shapes, colors, and textures. The complexity of their responses to the projects I introduced was pure magic.
These were children who, though young, already exhibited a deep understanding of the artistic process. Their art works were far more advanced than the typical works I’d seen from children their age—evident proof that art, when nurtured properly, could unlock a wealth of untapped potential. I had entered a new environment where I was free to innovate, unshackled by the constraints of traditional curriculums or bureaucratic expectations. The school, for all its imperfections, gave me the room to explore and build my own teaching program, a luxury I had not had in years.
In the early days, I relied on my past experiences and teaching methods to develop a program that was far more structured and demanding than anything the school had previously offered. I decided to take a bold approach: instead of designing lessons specifically for their age group, I used the same curriculum I had once given to my older high school students in Australia. My third graders tackled projects originally intended for seventh graders, fourth graders worked at an eighth-grade level, and so on. It was a risky experiment—I had no way of knowing how it would unfold. Would they become overwhelmed and frustrated, unable to keep up? Or would something remarkable emerge from the challenge?
Day after day, I stood before my students, each class beginning with a sense of anticipation, a recognition of possibility. The art room was a space without barriers—where students were free to engage fully with the work before them, guided by structured projects designed to develop their technical skills and understanding. This is where true art education takes place: not in vague encouragements about self-expression but in the deliberate process of learning how to produce exceptional work through careful observation, disciplined practice, and thoughtful decision-making.
Judgment was ever-present—but not the kind that stifles. It was the necessary evaluation that allowed students to refine their work, to recognize when they had mixed colors effectively, drawn their forms with accuracy and confidence, made intelligent use of textures, and composed their images with purpose. It encouraged them not to shy away from difficult elements but to engage with them fully, to see challenge as an essential part of progress. This was not empty praise or generic encouragement but a process of meaningful critique—one that, far from discouraging, left students with a genuine sense of accomplishment.
Their work, though often unpolished, carried with it the marks of serious effort and growing understanding. Unlike the jaded adolescents I had once taught, who resisted instruction and saw learning as an imposition, these younger students embraced the process—seeing, perhaps instinctively, that mastery in art is not about vague notions of “creativity” but about learning how to see, how to think, and how to make.
Of course, as with any endeavor, there were challenges. In the high school section of the school, there was another art teacher—one whose approach to the subject was far less inspiring. Her students’ work was uninspired and technically lacking, and as I reviewed their projects, it became painfully clear why they had never been displayed. The art they produced was a reflection of the teacher herself—untouched by passion, uninformed by the nuances of the subject. The tension between her approach and mine was inevitable.
I offered help, as I always did, but she, a staunch believer in the status quo, was reluctant to accept. She was a “team player,” politically aligned with the school’s administration, and her commitment to the Christian principles that underpinned the institution seemed to overshadow her ability—or desire—to teach art in any meaningful way. The students, as a result, were disillusioned, unmotivated, and uninterested. They had no outlet for their creative expression, no avenue through which to develop their talents. The art room, for them, had become a barren space, devoid of the spark that might have ignited their passion for the subject.
Despite these challenges, I remained steadfast. I continued to teach with conviction, to inspire with purpose, and to create an environment in which students could flourish. In doing so, I realized that, like the art I taught, teaching itself was a work in progress. It was a journey of discovery, one that required patience, perseverance, and a belief in the transformative power of creativity. And, in that small international school in Chiang Mai, I found that belief once again—a belief that the true value of education lies not in conformity, but in the freedom to explore, to create, and to express.
As for the school’s administration, they may never have fully understood the significance of what I was doing. They may have viewed art as little more than a decoration, a frivolous pursuit. But to me, it was everything. And as long as I could teach it, I would continue to fight for its place in the curriculum, knowing that, in the end, it was not just the students who would benefit from it—but the world itself.
*********************************
“China: An Adventure into Cultural History”
There are moments in life when a single, seemingly small decision alters the course of existence in ways one could never have anticipated. Such was the moment I realized that Thailand was not a place for my daughter. Though we had spent many days on the sunlit shores of the Andaman Sea, where the waters were as warm as the gentle embrace of sleep, and though she adored her nanny and played with an innocence that seemed impervious to time, there remained an unease, an invisible resistance that neither of us could quite name. For all the joy that Thailand might have offered, it was never truly hers.
The attention she received, the ceaseless fascination with her blonde hair, the hands of strangers reaching out to touch her as though she were some rare and delicate relic from an ancient world—all of it disturbed her. In markets, on street corners, even in the quiet spaces we sought for respite, she found no sanctuary. When she cried in protest, they laughed, not cruelly perhaps, but with the detached amusement of those who have never had to consider the world from another’s eyes. This alone was reason enough to leave.
Yet, the departure was not an abandonment of one place so much as it was the search for another, a movement not dictated by necessity in the conventional sense—employment, security, the mundane justifications of relocation—but by something more elusive: the need to find a space where we could exist in peace, where my daughter could be seen not as an object of curiosity but as a person, where I could continue to teach art in a manner unburdened by bureaucracy or constraint.
Ironically, it was this very thing—the golden hair that had unsettled her in Thailand—that secured our next destination. Unbeknownst to me at the time, my daughter’s presence was a currency of its own in the international school system of China. A school administrator, speaking with unguarded pragmatism, later confided that they needed blonde-haired children to bolster the institution’s image of global diversity. The irony did not escape me: that which had made one place unbearable made another place eager to welcome us.
And so, after a brief return to Australia, where the ordinary rhythms of a familiar landscape passed like a scene one has watched too many times to feel its original impact, I packed my paints, a few suitcases, and whatever remnants of a life already in motion could be carried, and we boarded a plane bound for Shanghai.
We arrived in the thick of summer, the air pressing upon us like a weight one could neither escape nor ignore. At the airport, we were met by the school’s administrators and a handful of other newly arriving teachers, all herded into a van that wound its way toward Suzhou—a city that, by Chinese standards, was modest in scale, though with its six million inhabitants, it dwarfed any notion I had previously held of a “small town.”
Suzhou revealed itself gradually, not in grand gestures but in details—a procession of ancient waterways reflecting the golden light of late afternoon, the hushed reverence of gardens cultivated for centuries, the rhythmic pulse of life in markets where old men and women sold produce with a quiet dignity that made commerce feel almost sacred. This was to be our home.
The school, vast in comparison to my previous institutions, employed three primary art teachers and three for the high school. My own role saw me teaching 750 students a week—an undertaking that transformed names into ephemeral impressions, recalled only in fleeting moments before being lost again in the tide of routine. At times, the experience was one of mechanical repetition, a production line of instruction not unlike the nearby factories assembling goods for global brands. And yet, the children themselves—predominantly Korean—were among the most respectful and eager students I had ever encountered. Their culture instilled in them a deference that made classroom management almost unnecessary, their enthusiasm a quiet but persistent reminder of why I had devoted my life to teaching art.
Unlike the fractured, bureaucratic approaches I had encountered elsewhere, the International Baccalaureate curriculum provided a structure that felt rigorous yet liberating. Within its framework, I refined my methods, developed programs that wove seamlessly into the school’s broader educational aims, and orchestrated collaborative projects that brought students together in ways beyond mere artistic instruction.
One such project remains vivid in my mind. We explored the religious heritage of Suzhou—its churches, mosques, and temples—allowing students to experience firsthand the architectural and symbolic nuances of Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism. From these visits, they sketched intricate motifs, selecting the most carefully observed designs to be transposed onto large canvases. The process was meticulous: from the disciplined handling of brushes to the deliberate mixing of colors, each stage required a patience and attentiveness that the students embraced with unexpected seriousness.
The completed works adorned the school’s corridors, transforming once-sterile walls into a gallery of quiet reverence. Administrators, normally indifferent to artistic endeavors, found themselves unable to ignore the impact. A new understanding seemed to take hold, however briefly, that art was not merely an accessory to education but a vital component of it.
These three years in China were not merely a professional chapter but a passage in a larger journey, one shaped as much by the places we visited—the Great Wall, the terra cotta warriors of Xi’an, the sacred mountains and endless deserts—as by the quiet, everyday moments: my daughter slipping effortlessly into Mandarin while I stumbled over the most basic phrases, our evenings spent listening to musicians along the canals of Tongli, the rhythm of life unfolding in ways I could never have predicted.
There is, in the act of teaching, an implicit promise—that what is given will, in some form, endure beyond the classroom, beyond the canvas, beyond even the memory of the teacher himself. And as I look back on those years, I wonder whether, in the grand tide of history, our presence in China was merely a ripple or whether, somewhere, in some unseen way, something of what we did remains.
It is a great satisfaction, a kind of silent triumph, to witness a young mind, previously untutored in the intricate processes of art, begin to see with new eyes, to understand not only the forms and colors before them but the discipline of creation itself. I have long since abandoned the patience to humor those who, in their casual dismissal of art, proclaim, “I was never any good at it.” A statement so often uttered, with either an air of regret or self-satisfied detachment, as though their failure were the fault of some mysterious, elusive talent rather than the simple fact of neglect. And I, without hesitation, have always replied, “Then either you had a bad teacher, or you didn’t try. Perhaps both.”
For I have long known that the ability to produce art is no different from the ability to add numbers, to speak a language, to ride a bicycle, to cook a meal. There is no sorcery to it, no mystical “gift” bestowed upon a chosen few. The great masters—those titans of aesthetic and intellectual labor—did not emerge from the ether, fully formed and divinely inspired. They learned, and they studied. Some apprenticed under others, absorbing technique and discipline, refining their hand until their work reached the standard that would secure its place in a nation’s great halls. It is only the willfully ignorant who insist that art is some inexplicable gift, beyond the reach of common mortals, rather than the product of perseverance.
But though I had seen the transformation of so many students—had been, in some small way, their Virgil as they navigated the depths of their own potential—I still found myself restless. What I longed for was not merely to teach, but to teach at a greater depth, to challenge minds that could meet the challenge in return. I sought an environment where students, standing at the threshold of adulthood, might engage in the rigorous, disciplined inquiry that art demands. Until then, I had been confined to younger students, their hands still unsteady, their visions unformed. But I longed for more—an opportunity to see what could be achieved by those with the maturity to strive for real mastery. And so, strangely enough, I found it at what felt like the very edge of the earth.
A flight from Shanghai to Beijing is brief, but long enough for a kind of dreamlike contemplation. Seated by the window, as I often arranged it, I watched as the plane descended into what can only be described as a dense, swirling soup—air thick with the residue of coal, the fine dust of an empire built on ceaseless production. The approach into Beijing was an approach into a world veiled in murk. The pollution did not obscure the city entirely, but rather lent it the quality of a faded daguerreotype, its outlines blurred, its once-bold structures reduced to silhouettes.
I had not come merely to pass through. There, in a small café within the confines of the airport, I was to meet the principal of an international school—not in China, but in Mongolia. The name alone evoked a landscape of vast emptiness, of endless plains where history had been written on horseback. She was an Australian, and ordinarily, I find little affinity with my country-folk in foreign lands, but there was something in her directness, her unpretentiousness, that made her seem apart from the usual breed of school administrators. She was not polished with the usual bureaucratic veneer. She spoke plainly, but not without intelligence, and when our conversation ended, she boarded her flight to Ulaanbaatar, and I returned to Shanghai, uncertain of what would follow.
The answer came swiftly. The very next day, an email arrived. She wanted me to join her school. It would mean teaching senior students, guiding them through the culmination of their artistic studies. Without hesitation, I resigned from my school in Suzhou. My daughter and I would miss China—we already did. Even now, I feel its absence. But the call of the unknown was stronger.
Mongolia.
The van that met us at the airport smelled of sheep. Or was it goats? I suspect both, though I could not have said whether the distinction was meaningful. The vehicle, evidently, had doubled as livestock transport, and its lingering traces of wool and earth accompanied us as we bumped along roads that seemed to dissolve into the landscape rather than cut through it. Mongolia was unlike any place I had known—an expanse of silence and wind, its beauty stark and indifferent.
We had prepared for this. During a brief reconnaissance trip, taken during a school holiday in Suzhou, we had purchased an apartment—a Soviet-era structure of severe, functional lines, set above a row of small shops. It was centrally located, near the town square, near the low, sprawling administrative buildings that dictated the rhythms of Ulaanbaatar. In summer, when we arrived, the city was light-filled, wildflowers pressing against the roadside, the hills beyond still green. But I knew what was coming. The power station loomed to the northwest, a brooding industrial beast that would soon send black plumes across the city, providing the heat that would keep our pipes from freezing. For winter here was not simply cold—it was absolute. Temperatures would drop to -45°C, ice would seize the land, and the city would become an endurance test.
The school, where my new life would begin, was on the far outskirts of town. The daily journey should have been simple, but in Ulaanbaatar, nothing moved simply. A morning trip might take 15 minutes; the same route in the afternoon would stretch to two hours, an immovable tide of cars locked in place, roads unchanged for decades despite the flood of new vehicles.
Still, I had come for the teaching, and soon I would begin. On my first visit to the school, I met the outgoing art teacher, met some of the students whose education I was to shape. They seemed pleasant, eager enough. But the real test would come later, in the long winter, in the isolation that Mongolia both imposed and invited. It was a place that required adaptation, that forced one to become either hardened or lost. I did not yet know which I would become.
But I had sought something deeper, something that would challenge and reshape me. And so I had come, to this raw and ancient land, to the ends of the earth.
The school, still exuding the freshness of new construction, stood like an anomaly against the Mongolian landscape, a structure of straight lines and polished surfaces set against the rough, endless terrain. My art room, situated at the corner of the second floor, offered a view that could be called expansive, though its beauty was of a stark and disciplined kind. To the south, hills rose gently, their slopes adorned with trees so slender and upright that they seemed almost disciplined by the elements, as if standing in formation against the tyranny of the Mongolian winter. I often found myself wondering how anything at all could survive such a winter, how roots could persist beneath soil frozen solid for months, how a branch, so delicate, could resist the unrelenting force of wind and ice.
As always, I was confronted with the perpetual difficulty of the art teacher: the scarcity of materials. I wandered through the local art shops, such as they were—more assemblages of necessity than temples of artistic indulgence—seeking oil paint, brushes of tolerable quality, and whatever else might be salvaged. It became evident, through the nature of what had been left behind, that my predecessor had not been a true artist. This was not merely a question of skill but of philosophy; to teach art well, to grant students the means of discovery, is to provide them with a wealth of materials, to let them understand that art is not confined to a single medium but is a universe of possibilities, each material offering its own revelations. This truth, so self-evident to the artist, was invisible to the bureaucrats who controlled the school’s purse strings, as it had always been invisible to those for whom art was merely an ornament rather than an essential means of understanding the world.
The only oil paints I found were from China—unsurprising, as almost everything in the shops of Ulaanbaatar originated from there. China was not merely a neighbor but the source of most commodities, an economic lifeline stretching across the border. I established oil painting as a primary medium in the classroom, knowing that its slow drying time and capacity for blending would allow my students to work with a patience and deliberation that faster-drying acrylics did not permit. In the hands of the careful and the meticulous, oil paint can perform miracles; it offers a kind of forgiveness that allows true learning to unfold.
The classes were small, a mixed blessing. With fewer students, materials could be distributed more generously, attention more individually tailored. But small numbers could also stifle the vital energy of a room, allowing dominant personalities to either drive momentum or, just as easily, stifle it. In a class of six, if two were motivated, two indifferent, and two disengaged, the weight of inertia could be difficult to overcome. And then there was the inevitable distance, the chasm that exists between teacher and student at the beginning, before familiarity smooths the edges of caution and formality, before trust is built and minds can open to more profound discussions of aesthetics, meaning, and personal vision.
Yet, in time, there were those who surrendered to the work, who fell into that quiet, focused space where something true emerges. I had seen it before in other places, but here, at the edge of the world, it carried a particular poignancy. I made it a principle, in all my years of teaching, to work with what was near, to root projects in the local environment, for art does not emerge in a vacuum; it must be in dialogue with the world around it.
One bitterly cold winter’s day, I arranged for my students—year sevens, eager and obliging—to take a short trip into town, a mere ten-minute drive in the school bus. The sun was sharp, the sky vast and untroubled by clouds. In this, Ulaanbaatar defied expectation, for though winter here was unrelenting, it was also clear and dry. It was a mistake to equate cold with snow; snow required moisture, and moisture was scarce on the edge of the Gobi. We walked through the city, sketching architectural details—the severe lines of Soviet-era buildings, the embellishments of the new Parliament, the colossal and brooding presence of Genghis Khan, seated in judgment over his nation.
The students, as was typical in international schools, were polite, engaged, and generally well-behaved. Yet as we stood in the open air, something began to press in upon us, something insidious and absolute. At first, it was merely a heightened awareness of the cold, then a sharpness in the breath, a slowing of the fingers. I looked closely at two of the girls and saw, through the white clouds of their exhalations, something strange—something I had previously seen only in photographs of doomed Arctic expeditions. Their breath had begun to crystallize upon their eyelashes, forming miniature icicles that clung there, delicate but ominous. The cold was not merely discomforting; it was becoming dangerous.
The realization struck me with an alarming clarity. We were freezing.
Spilled water on the pavement had solidified into treacherous patches of black ice, and already, three students had fallen. The wind, relentless and indifferent, was extracting warmth from our bodies at an accelerating rate. The students, initially absorbed in their work, were now shifting uncomfortably, rubbing their gloved hands together, glancing at me with the implicit question: When are we leaving? The coats they wore, thick as they were, were no match for such conditions.
It was -27°C.
I gathered the students swiftly, ushered them back to the bus, and watched as their movements became stiff, their gestures sluggish. In the warmth of the vehicle, faces gradually returned to color, fingers regained sensation, and the danger ebbed away. But the memory of it did not.
Winter deepened. The holidays arrived. In the mornings, it was -45°C, a temperature that defied comprehension, that transformed breath into ice, that made the very idea of warmth seem like an illusion from another life. For two Australians, the experience was otherworldly. To explain it to those back home was futile; they would nod, smile, and assume it was an exaggeration, for how could one convey the sensation of lungs resisting the very act of breathing, of a world so frozen that it ceased to seem real?
I had long dreamed of seeing Lake Baikal, that vast and unfathomable expanse of Siberian water, its depths locked beneath meters of ice. But I realized, with a rare moment of absolute certainty, that I could not. I could not take my daughter into such a place, could not risk the unpredictable, the unknown, the perilous.
Instead, we fled to another world entirely.
And so, we found ourselves once more in Thailand, beneath a sun so warm it seemed to burn away all memory of the cold, on a beach where the air was thick with salt and the languid sound of waves. There, winter ceased to exist, replaced by an illusion of endless summer. And yet, beneath the warmth, beneath the gentle lapping of the tide, I carried with me the image of frozen breath, the sound of brittle ice beneath hurried footsteps, the knowledge that somewhere, far to the north, the world was locked in a silence deeper than words.
My daughter, then eight years old, sat beside me, absorbed in her latest acquisition—a freshly printed edition of Harry Potter, its pages still crisp, its spine yet to be broken. I had asked her, with the gravity that only a parent can summon, to focus solely on her reading, to let me conduct my interview undisturbed. But, being a child, she was heedless of such requests. At crucial moments, as I strained to catch the nuances of my interviewer’s questions, she would tug at my sleeve, insistently whispering some urgent observation about the plot, some revelation she could not possibly keep to herself. Her interruptions, though innocent, were relentless, and I was torn between irritation and a helpless, paternal affection. For how could she understand that my ability to secure employment, to continue this erratic journey across continents, depended on my undivided attention? How could she know that, in the space of a few minutes, decisions might be made that would shape the course of both our lives?
As the plane lifted from Bangkok and carried us away from the turquoise embrace of the Gulf of Thailand, I peered down at the landscape unfolding below—rice paddies, rivers tracing languid lines through the earth, the distant haze of cities—and thought, as I often did, of the strange trajectory our lives had taken. Far below, the world stretched out in infinite detail, yet at this altitude, it was reduced to abstraction, an ever-receding tapestry of light and shadow. And above it all, my thoughts drifted, uncontained, untethered.
Mongolia had not been easy. It was not only the winters, though they were bitter enough to etch themselves into memory with the precision of a chisel on stone. It was the difficulty of finding the simplest of things—fresh vegetables, fruit that did not bear the marks of its long and arduous journey from the south of China, bread that did not turn green with mold before it reached the shelves. Everything that could be preserved, was. Everything that could not, withered. Food was not merely sustenance; it was a constant negotiation between necessity and disappointment. The markets offered only root vegetables, hardy survivors of frost and distance, while anything delicate—lettuce, beans—arrived weary from the long trek across steppe, desert, and plain.
And yet, these were inconveniences, nothing more. The deeper difficulty lay elsewhere, in the unspoken assumption that teachers, even those entrusted with the education of the privileged, should accept wages that barely reflected their expertise. I had long since come to the conclusion that if a school wished to attract competent professionals, it should be willing to pay them accordingly. This particular school, it seemed, did not share that belief.
The plane continued its course over a landscape devoid of human presence, and my mind, untethered from the constraints of conversation, wandered as it always did. I found myself thinking of Vienna, the first city in Europe I had ever visited, the city that had first made me question whether I could ever truly return to Australia. Could it have been real? Or had it been some elaborate dream, a mirage conjured from art and architecture, from the dim glow of museum corridors and the gold-flecked grandeur of Klimt? And yet, no—Vienna had existed, had stood before me in all its undeniable beauty, had confirmed everything I had instinctively known but had never before seen. That this, this civilization of marble and music, was where I belonged.
Australia, by contrast, seemed raw, unfinished, a country still shaking off the dust of its colonial past. Of course, this was an exaggeration, but there was truth in it nonetheless. I had read the Antipodean Manifesto, understood its arguments, recognized myself in its contrasts. Europe was where I turned first in my search for employment. Every year, I applied to every available position in every European city, but the closest I had come was an interview in Munich—a city that, for a brief moment, had seemed within my grasp, only to slip away like so many others before it. The profession offered no explanations, no clarifications. One was either chosen or not, without ever truly understanding why. The process, which should have been educational, was instead opaque.
And so I found myself knocking at the back door of Europe, employed—unexpectedly—by British Petroleum. An unlikely patron for an art teacher, and yet an employer nonetheless. My task, at first, was simple: to teach children once more, though in an environment unlike any I had ever known. For the first time in nearly two decades of teaching, I worked alongside a man who displayed a genuine curiosity in what I did. He was competent, meticulous, devoted to his role. He saw, as so few did, that art was not mere decoration, not an indulgence, but something fundamental, something that shaped the way children saw the world. He strove to align our work with the expectations of the International Baccalaureate, and in doing so, he too began to learn—an irony that did not escape me. But the machinery of bureaucracy is relentless, and he, like so many before him, was eventually cast aside. His departure was a loss not only to me but to the children he had served.
In time, I ascended—both physically and professionally—to the high school division. There, I encountered the established art teacher, an artist of sorts, who gave her support to my new position. It was here that I began, in earnest, to push the boundaries of what was possible. To move beyond the comfortable standard of a well-run art department. The curriculum of the International Baccalaureate offered the framework, but excellence could only emerge if both teacher and institution were committed to it. And in my experience, this confluence was rare.
Caen Dennis Oil on Canvas. “Title withheld”. Student work - a beginning of higher quality work. In the direction of perfection.
Resistance came, as it always does. Some students clung to the methods of my predecessor, who had—unthinkably—worked directly on their canvases, guiding their hands, softening their errors. It was an approach I rejected outright. To me, such intervention was akin to deception, to a kind of artistic fraudulence. And yet, when I refused to replicate this practice, I was met with suspicion, even resistance. The students, accustomed to having their work polished by another’s hand, felt abandoned. Worse, the school administration, swayed by the voices of a few privileged adolescents—the children of British Petroleum’s executives—chose to listen to them rather than to me.
It was absurd. No one would tolerate a mathematics teacher who solved the problems on behalf of the student, a science teacher who conducted the experiments unaided, an English teacher who wrote the essays. And yet, here, in the realm of art, the deception was not only tolerated but expected.
I would not yield.
For I knew, as only a teacher can, that true education does not reside in the comfortable repetition of past methods, but in the quiet, often painful struggle of genuine discovery.
It is only now, after so many years, that I begin to understand—though perhaps understanding is too strong a word, for what is understanding but an approximation, a reaching toward a truth that forever slips through one’s fingers?—why certain people, certain colleagues, certain figures of authority, would greet me not with the indifference one might expect from those who simply do not care, nor with the polite civility that social convention demands, but with something else entirely, something colder, more deliberate, a contempt that was at once disdainful and covert, that lingered in the clipped tone of a voice, in averted glances, in silences heavy with implication. For years, I puzzled over this, perplexed by the apparent hostility that had neither provocation nor cause, at least none that I could discern. When met with rudeness, I may have responded in kind, but never—never—had I been the instigator. And yet, the pattern repeated itself, as though I had, unwittingly, inspired in others a resentment I neither sought nor understood.
I would ask myself: why? Why should my mere presence unsettle them so? Why should my existence, the simple fact of it, be met with this unspoken resistance, this refusal, this scorn? For a long time, I sought the answer in myself—perhaps I had been at fault, perhaps I had, in some way unknown to me, provoked their disdain. And yet, what I had perceived as a mystery, an enigma without resolution, revealed itself, with time, to be something far simpler. It was jealousy. Nothing more, nothing less. Not the petty, fleeting kind that momentarily stings and is forgotten, but the deeper, more corrosive variety, the kind that gnaws at a person from within, that turns admiration into resentment, desire into hostility. They had wanted something I possessed—not a material thing, for that can be taken or bought—but something more intangible, something that, no matter how they labored, no matter how they conformed, remained beyond their reach. And so they despised me for it.
Had I understood this earlier—had I, at twenty-five or thirty, grasped what only now, at sixty-five, seems so painfully obvious—perhaps my wounds would not have been so deep, my disappointments not so bitter. Perhaps I would not have wasted so much time wondering, questioning, doubting. And yet, what does it matter now? The past, immutable as it is, exists only in memory, and if those who envied me then still envy me now, so be it. Let them stew in their discontent. I, for my part, will continue—continue to learn, to paint, to seek. For even now, after all these years, I am still learning, still discovering, and that, perhaps, is what torments them most—that I have never ceased to grow. My recent works, my reflections of Pirna, have taught me much—about composition, about the principles of hyperrealism, about the way light bends and fragments upon the surface of glass. And with each painting, I uncover something new, a technique, a nuance of color, a truth about the nature of perception itself. It is, above all, a pleasure, a satisfaction so profound that I can scarcely put it into words. Is it only me who feels this? Only me who delights in the act of creation, in the challenge of refining one’s craft? Surely not. But if others cannot find this joy, if they can only seethe with jealousy at what they lack the courage or devotion to pursue, then let them. They are missing out.
I recall, with vivid clarity, the day I was dismissed from my position at the British Petroleum school. Three years I had taught there, and then, one afternoon, I was summoned—like a schoolboy called before the headmaster, as if I had committed some great transgression, some unspeakable offense. The absurdity of it did not escape me, even then. I had anticipated hostility, but not this—a pronouncement so abrupt, so final, that it seemed almost theatrical in its cruelty. “You are no longer employed,” the director said, and though I had suspected such an outcome, the bluntness of it still sent a jolt through me. I had brought a colleague with me to witness the exchange, and as the words left the director’s mouth, I saw my colleague’s expression contort into something between disbelief and outrage. His jaw slackened, his brows knit together. And yet, I, who had long been acquainted with the bureaucratic machinations of lesser men, was unmoved. Without hesitation, I asked the only question that mattered: “Why?”
A single word. A challenge. A refusal to accept the arbitrary nature of the decision.
The director, a man whose power resided not in his intellect nor his abilities but in the sheer accident of his position, stiffened. “Because,” he said, as if that were answer enough.
“Because why?” I pressed.
“I don’t have to give you a reason,” he replied, a slight smirk tugging at his lips, as though he were a monarch dispensing justice, unquestionable and absolute.
The sheer absurdity of it—this pretense of authority, this flimsy assertion of control—might have been laughable had it not been so pathetic. I saw him for what he was in that moment: a coward, a man who wielded power not through respect or merit but through the arbitrary dictates of an institution that rewarded mediocrity and punished excellence.
And so, I posed one final question, a question that turned his complacency into panic: “Would you like me to leave now? This afternoon? Would that be convenient for you?”
The effect was immediate. He twitched in his seat, his face reddening, his composure slipping. He had not expected this, had not considered that I, unlike so many others, was not bound by financial necessity, that I had the freedom to walk away. “No, no,” he stammered, the false authority in his voice replaced by something closer to pleading. “You can stay until the end of the year.”
And with that, the meeting was over. My colleague and I left without another word, the silence between us heavy with the unspoken recognition of what had just transpired.
My daughter finished her schooling there, and I remained until the final day of the term, savoring the last moments of teaching—though not, as I had once imagined, with any sense of triumph or satisfaction, but rather with a quiet sadness, an understanding that the work I had only begun, the potential I had glimpsed in my students, would never be realized under the guidance of such men.
For how can true artistry flourish when those in power are blind to beauty? How can excellence be nurtured when it is governed by mediocrity? There was, I realized, an unbridgeable chasm between their world and mine. Theirs was a world of limitations, of constraints, of dull and suffocating convention. Mine was a world of possibility, of unrelenting curiosity, of a hunger to create, to explore, to push beyond the boundaries of what was known.
And so, I left. Not defeated, not broken, but resolute. I would continue to paint, to learn, to seek. And they, for all their petty victories, would remain where they were—small men in small offices, clinging to their illusions of control.
A tragedy, perhaps. But not mine.
Realizing, with a quiet resignation that carried neither bitterness nor regret, that the true teaching of art—art in its fullest, most profound sense—would find no home for me in the institutions of Europe, my daughter and I turned our gaze elsewhere, toward a different horizon, and so we set forth on a journey, a long and winding passage down the spine of South America, moving ever southward, away from the familiar, away from the weight of past disappointments, tracing a course that, by some unspoken design of fate, would complete the great arc of our travels, a circumnavigation not merely of the globe, but of all that had shaped us in those nine years—a voyage not of return, but of continuation, the next chapter unfolding, as it always must, toward the unknown.
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“Australia, Four Years”
“What do you think?” I asked my daughter. A simple question, composed of just three words, yet burdened with an immense and irrevocable weight. She was only fourteen, but there was no need for explanations. She already knew. She had known before I even spoke. She could read my thoughts as if they were written in the air between us, a silent script we both understood.
I was not asking for an opinion; I was asking for a verdict. Should we leave? Should we leave not for a time, not for a change of scenery, but forever?
It was not as though she leapt up in joy or clapped her hands in eager anticipation. She did not pause, nor did she hesitate. She simply said, “Yes, I think so.” And with those few words, delivered without sentimentality, without drama, she sealed our fate.
For four years she had grown into herself, an adolescent forming the first sketches of her adult self. And yet, as she put it in the quiet fortitude of her own words, this was not my home.
That truth had been crystallized for her in a classroom conversation, when, with the same earnestness with which one inquires about the weather, she had asked a teacher, “What is the Melbourne Cup?” The question was genuine, devoid of irony or provocation. And yet, the teacher laughed—though not in a way that suggested amusement. It was the sharp, incredulous laugh of someone who cannot comprehend that another might be unaware of the thing they take for granted. That this Australian girl did not know what the Melbourne Cup was seemed, to him, absurd. He did not stop to consider that, perhaps, she had not grown up in the same world as he had. That her Australia was different from his. That she was not, in any meaningful sense, an Australian girl at all. In fact, he had first assumed she was German—a strange premonition, considering what lay ahead of us.
There were other moments. Another teacher, another conversation. She told him, quite simply, about our recent journey—how we had driven along a mountain road at 15,350 feet above sea level, the world stretched out beneath us, the sky so close it felt as though it might dissolve into our breath. “No, you weren’t,” he said, as if stating a fact. Not a challenge, not a question. A decree.
What does one say to that? Even now, I find myself speechless when I think of it. How could I respond? What words would be sufficient to bridge the abyss between his narrow, provincial certainty and the reality we had lived? I could still see it so vividly—the thin air, the great volcanoes, their smoke curling into the sky like ancient whispers.
This is not the story I want to tell here; that will belong to another book. But what it revealed was something far greater than a mere failure of imagination. It exposed the fault lines in Australian culture, the inadequacies in its self-narrative, the rigid and unyielding refusal to acknowledge realities beyond its own narrow scope. These moments were not isolated; they were symptomatic. There was an inability, an unwillingness, to accept that truth might come in forms unfamiliar, that people from elsewhere—other places, other worlds—might have seen things they could not even conceive.
And so, the certainty grew in my daughter, etched indelibly into her mind, her soul. She had been, for nine years, a child of the world—an international child, a girl whose breadth of experience had already surpassed that of most adults in the country she now found herself in. And I, who had always been proud of her, found myself prouder still—because she was not like them.
For me, the decision was not merely about seeking another teaching post. It was not the lure of art alone that pulled me forward, but the force pushing me away. The omnipresent feeling that the place I had once called home had ceased to be so.
I had once been, if not a patriot, then at least a lover of the land itself. I had walked through its wild places with reverence, careful not to step on the snakes, pausing to admire the birds, kneeling to observe the intricate beauty of the wildflowers. I had believed that my contributions—my energy, my efforts—might find a place in the social fabric of this country. That I might be part of something worthwhile.
But I was wrong.
I reflected on this. I weighed it carefully, turned it over in my mind. And I realized that I did not approve of what I saw. The culture of bullying, the worship of mediocrity, the systematic cutting down of tall poppies—not as an accident, not as a side effect, but as a principle. The relentless, punishing ridicule of anyone who dared to be different. The expectation that one should drink beer every afternoon in the pub, shout over the deafening music in nightclubs, surrender every last cent to the dictates of consumerism.
It was not my world. It was a world uncounted, loud yet empty. A bogan world.
It is difficult to put into words something that is so deeply emotional, so deeply ingrained in the fabric of behavior. I had been ridiculed as a child for wearing glasses. I had grown into an adult who still wore glasses, and for this alone, I had been dismissed—socially invisible to women, for whom the primal imperative of mate selection left no room for cultural considerations. I was rejected by men for lacking their beer-fueled bravado, rejected by women for not embodying a crude, masculine ideal. And above all, I was misunderstood—for looking at the world through the eyes of an artist, for seeing in a way they could not.
So I built a wooden crate for Darwin, our green-winged macaw, and I bought three tickets—one for myself, one for my daughter, one for the bird.
If Europe did not offer me a place, I would carve one out for myself.
And why Dresden? Not because I had been there before. But because I knew it—not as a city, but as a name, as a wound in history. Dresden existed in my mind because of the fire, the great and terrible act that had made it infamous in the last days of the war. That was what had first drawn me to it. Only later would I learn that it was a cheaper place to live than most others in Germany.
But in that moment, none of that mattered. What mattered was that we were leaving. That we were moving toward something. That the next chapter was about to begin.
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“A Saxon School”.
And so, after all the years of journeying, after tracing an arc that swept from Thailand to China, through Mongolia, skirting the edges of Europe in Azerbaijan before finally stepping onto its hallowed ground, I found myself, at last, in an art room. In Europe. In an international school in Saxony.
I will not name the school, though the omission is of little consequence. Any reader who has followed the winding path of my story will, without much effort, recognize it for what it is. I am compelled to silence by the document I was made to sign, a peculiar piece of bureaucracy that seemed to exist not for any genuine legal necessity but as a manifestation of a deeper, more intrinsic characteristic of the German disposition—paranoia.
But never mind that. The name does not matter. What matters is the fact of my presence there, the curious illusion it presented, the way an outside observer, glancing at my circumstances from a distance, might have assumed that I had arrived, that my desires had been fulfilled, my ambitions realized.
And yet, nothing could be further from the truth.
For I was there not as the chosen teacher, not as the culmination of years of dedication to my craft, but merely as a placeholder—a stopgap solution to an inconvenient vacancy, the result of another teacher’s inability to return from South America due to the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Thus, the story of my time teaching in Saxony is, in fact, a story of not teaching art. And the more I reflect upon that paradox, the more it takes on a kind of absurdist quality, a bizarre spectacle that defies reason the further one delves into its details.
I had applied for this position not once, not twice, but four times over the span of four years. And each time, I had been passed over in favor of individuals who, by any objective measure, were less qualified—some had never taught in international schools, others had no background in teaching art at all. How could I explain this in a way that did not make it seem utterly implausible?
Very well, let me try.
The teacher I was replacing had been an engineer by training, though she fancied herself an artist. Her predecessor had been appointed not for any expertise in art but for her philanthropic work in the so-called third world. The one before her had secured the job on the basis of some voluntary craft activities. And when the engineer, predictably, departed, she was replaced yet again by another—by that point, I had stopped paying attention to the process, resigned to the sheer irresponsibility and incompetence of those in charge. Perhaps, finally, an actual art teacher had been hired. But given the pattern, I had my doubts.
What was certain, however, was that I was never given a reason for my repeated rejection, despite my thirty years of experience, my professional standing as a recognized artist, my deep knowledge of art history, my command of practical techniques and materials, my pedagogical expertise, my complete familiarity with the International Baccalaureate program. These, apparently, were qualities of no significance.
I remember the words of the young woman who had secured the job through her charitable work. As she walked out of the school, without embarrassment or irony, she turned to me and said, “I think you need some knowledge of art to be an art teacher.”
It was one of those moments that leaves you utterly dumbfounded. A moment so absurd that it resists comprehension.
The students, of course, suffered for this negligence. It was evident in their attitudes, in their work, in their complete disengagement. They had spent years being given an inferior education, being led through lessons by individuals who had no business guiding them. When I arrived, to teach only for a few days, I nevertheless introduced them to projects that allowed them to succeed, to create something meaningful, to take pride in their work. And yet, even this was dismissed by the administration and the then returned art teacher, lacking any real understanding, looked at what my students had produced and offered only a flippant remark—“too stylistic,” she said, as though she had stumbled upon some profound critique. It was a comment to mask her incompetence as it was obvious the students works had improved in only a few days. Over these four years I often offered my help- it was always refused.
What she could not see—what none of them could see—was that the students had been let down, over and over again. That a properly trained teacher in the lower grades would have elevated the standards of the entire school. That education itself would have been enriched. But such matters seemed to concern no one.
In the quiet twilight of my career—a time when the corridors of that school seemed to whisper of unspoken goodbyes and silent farewells—I found myself pondering a truth that had long festered beneath the surface of my daily existence. It was not only the end of a vocation defined by chalk dust and fleeting flashes of creative brilliance, but also the subtle, bitter revelation of how institutions function best when their members are molded into compliant, unthinking cogs. In the administrative realm, it appeared that true ease was found not in the challenging of norms with creative alternatives, but in the seamless adherence to routine, in the effortless echo of orders. For I had come to suspect that those who despised the art of teaching, yet found their calling in governing schools, were often little more than beneficiaries of a system that prized uniformity over innovation.
I recall, with a certain wry nostalgia, the early days of my career—a time when the very idea of stepping into an administrative role beckoned with a promise of change. I did everything in my power to secure that position. I interviewed for it three times. And each time, I was asked a question I could never quite answer—not because it was difficult, but because it was meaningless.
“Are you a team player?”
That inquiry, so deceptively simple, always caught me off guard. My mind would drift back to childhood, to sunlit schoolyards and Wednesday afternoons when I longed to bowl the ball or take the first turn at bat, yet was consistently left on the periphery—not for lack of ability, but for a deficit in popularity. In those days, the socially dominant were invariably chosen for the game, granted the privilege of participation, while I watched, always a spectator. And so, as an adult faced with that very question, I could only wonder: How could I be a team player when I had never truly been allowed the chance to learn what it meant to be one?
What, then, did it mean? In the eyes of those who governed, it was not about the spirited exchange of ideas or the bold offering of creative alternatives; it was a litmus test of obedience—a simple Yes to signal that one could, without question, do exactly as told. In that light, the role of an administrator was rendered all the more facile, their tasks eased by a collective acquiescence rather than enriched by genuine collaboration. Thus, my reflections on poor school—and perhaps, more broadly, poor general—administration grew. For it is not the brilliance of creative minds that simplifies management, but rather the quiet, resigned compliance that leaves little room for dissent or alternative thought.
In that final chapter, as I bid farewell in silence to a career of creative striving, I carried with me not only the memories of a lifetime in art and teaching, but also the enduring question: What truly constitutes a team player when the very concept is redefined as the absence of challenge, the renunciation of creativity, and the unthinking adherence to a script written by those who never sought to teach at all?
But whether my answer had any bearing on my rejection, I do not know. Perhaps nothing did.
And so my time at the school was not the fulfillment of my journey, but its anticlimax. The great irony of it all was that, though I had spent five years there, I had not spent them teaching art. I had been given other subjects, substituting where needed, following lesson plans designed by others, using the same skills I had always possessed to engage with students—but in a role that was not my own.
Why did it happen this way? Was it sheer incompetence on the part of the administration? Or was there some hidden agenda, one that ensured the continued decline of educational standards?
I could not say. I could only ask the questions.
But what I did know, with absolute certainty, was that I could not remain in a place that so thoroughly disregarded the young minds it was supposed to nurture.
And so it ended—quietly, without fanfare, as so many endings do, not with a final burst of light but with the slow extinguishing of a candle one had watched burning for years. The end of my time in that school, yes—but more than that, the end of a vocation that had, through countless terms and tangled moments, come to define the rhythm of my life. The end, too, of a particular way of being in the world, of seeing it not merely through my own eyes, but through the tentative, flickering vision of those I had taught to look and look again.
There was no crescendo, no final chorus to mark the moment when I slipped quietly from the stage. It was, in the end, an anti-climax—and yet, I smile, even now, at the thought of it. For what a tale it makes, stitched together from fragments of colour and chalk dust, from fierce debates over perspective and light, from the unteachable, unruly beauty of youth. The classroom, like a palimpsest, holds them all still—those voices, those sketches, those brief flashes of understanding that flared and were gone.
But if any proof were needed of the true nature of that place—its cold marrow, its sterile heart—it lay in the silence that followed my departure. After five years of service, of presence, of persistence, there was no farewell, no word of luck or warmth from the adults whose corridors I had shared, whose students I had nurtured. Not a single goodbye. And though, after a lifetime observing such behavior, it troubled me only slightly—only enough to ask again, in that familiar, weary way, what is it that withers in some people, in some institutions, that they cannot bring themselves to acknowledge another’s quiet passing?
To the students, I said nothing. There was no announcement, no lesson turned elegy. Only a final, almost accidental conversation with the one student who had, over the years, shared with me the language of art. And though they did not know it—though even I was not sure until later—that moment was my private farewell. A thread of meaning passed, unspoken, between two minds, one last time.
Yes, it was the end. But what a story I carry with me.
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