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From The Huffington Post

But there was so much more to that final year of school for me.  It was do or die with regards to the Tertiary Entrance Examinations and cut off scores for university entrance.  I remember vividly how my friends and I spent a great deal of time trying to predict our scores based on our term marks and what we got in the mocks.  We tried to predict exam questions.  Our teachers swapped our exam papers with other schools’ versions.  The exams were pretty much everything for that year for me.

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My down time was spent doing some pretty tame things.  While the popular girls of our year were out  With Boys in their rugby shirts, Levi 501s and Doc Martens (both them and the boys), I was home with my specs watching Press Gang and Tonight Live with Steve Vizard.

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They were exciting times.  I know the sarcasm is palpable but I look back at that time of my life without any regret that I wasn’t more rebellious or less of a dag.  I guess I was being true to who I was and what I wanted to achieve at the time.  I was comfortable with who I was, content in my own company and that’s not a bad place to be when you’re seventeen.

But yes, I do wonder what became of the popular girls….  I wonder if they ever think about the rest of us with that same kind of detached curiosity.  We weren’t a bullying or ‘Mean Girls’ kind of school.  We respected each others’ differences while remaining in fixed orbit within our unique cliques.  We also had some wonderful teachers who were able to work with each of our strengths and weaknesses and year co-ordinators who were never hesitated in their efforts to keep us on the straight and narrow.

I wonder what it’s like teaching the girls of today in our 24/7 world of social media, reality television, seriously skewed priorities in the mainstream media and the cult of celebrity.  Is school still a kind of haven for 17-year-olds where they can be themselves and also work towards their futures?  I hope it is.

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My final year of school was memorable also for the serious level of magazine reading I did on ‘breaks’ from studying.  From the glossies to the women’s interest ones, I read them all.  Fast forward to 2017 and the only chance I get to read them is on the plane or at the hairdresser’s.

Determined not to be a complete couch potato in Year 12, I started going for brisk walks interspersed with a few seconds of jogging.  I went from twice a week to daily and before I knew it, I was able to run continuously for 15 minutes.  The daily exercise thing is something I’ve been able to keep up ever since.  Not bad for someone who was terrible at PE.  Again, our teachers at school may have had a hand here.  We would go for walks occasionally for PE and many of our non sports teachers would drop a few casual comments here and there about their own approach to fitness.

But most of all, what I remember best about that final year of school was spending it in one of the most beautiful cities in the world.  Perth was and always will be ‘home’.  Some might call it dull and awfully quiet but Perth is family to me.  It’s also a place where the life I had was straightforward, predictable and safe.  I knew my place in it and that security has given me the courage, strength, and confidence to carve out this crazy new life for myself in Sydney – Perth’s glamorous but somewhat edgy cousin.