Two things happened to me recently that became bound together in my imagination. One was that I drove along Victoria's Great Ocean Road and visited, for the first time in years, the Twelve Apostles, those extraordinary, towering rock stacks left after 20 million years of battering by the Southern Ocean separated them from the original limestone cliffs and smashed their surrounding structures.
The other was a meeting I had with some student teachers. Their final exams were finished, the practical teaching rounds were all done and they were waiting on news of their appointment to some urban, suburban, rural or remote school where they would start their professional careers.
Their infectious anticipation, mixed with some apprehension and even, deep down, a certain dread, reminded me vividly of my own experience of that volatile, nervous time when, qualified at last, you had to leave the cloisters and face the world.
You'll be pleased to know I refrained from reminiscing but simply wished them luck and success. No such restraint, however, will prevent me from recalling those distant, testing days for the interest or despair of Eureka Street readers already stunned by the sudden swift arrival of yet another Christmas.
Having completed a degree and a diploma of education, my mate and I put in identical applications: on top of our lists were high schools in Wangaratta, Yarrawonga, Shepparton and other Victorian north-eastern towns. At the bottom were the most remote eastern and western schools in the state. I was appointed to Shepparton Technical School; he got Orbost High.
As we had developed during our diploma year a sturdy reputation for recalcitrance, we immediately suspected conspiracy and a deliberate policy to put us as far apart as geography allowed, though one of our more cynical colleagues suggested that the Education Department could not have mustered the administrative acumen to achieve such a sophisticated result and it was probably just bad luck.
After a couple of years we both returned to Melbourne. It was 1960. My new headmaster at a sprawling suburban high school was a large, loud, somewhat pompous bloke. At our first meeting, having wrongly assumed that my two years at Shepparton Tech must have been 'a baptism of fire', he told me