The Night a Bandicoot Joined the Poetry Reading
On the evening of 30 August 2022, Stage 2 and Stage 3 students stood on the grass outside their classroom at North Head and performed for their parents. The harbour was behind them. The sun was going down. And partway through, a bandicoot trotted across the stage.
Nobody had arranged this. The stage is a patch of lawn, and the lawn is inside a national park.
A school with a national park for a backyard
The primary campus sits in the old Gatehouse of the School of Artillery, inside North Head Sanctuary. It is a spectacular place to put a school, and the easy thing would be to treat it as scenery — a nice view from the classroom window, something to photograph for the prospectus.
That is not how it has worked out.
In 2019 a zoologist working in the Sanctuary came in to talk to the children about her research, and to ask whether they would like to help. She had three projects running in the bushland just outside the school grounds: building insect hotels, monitoring bandicoot nests, and digging a pond for frogs.
The students said yes. And because they had said yes, the research that followed was not an exercise. Children in the upper primary classroom took on their own investigations into barking owls, eastern pygmy possums and bush rats — what threatens them, and what can be done about it. The animals in question were not illustrations in a textbook. They were neighbours.
We are so lucky to be part of this beautiful and very special national park.
That was the teacher’s note in the newsletter at the time, and it is the reason the bandicoot story is worth telling. A child who has spent a term monitoring bandicoot nests, and who then watches one wander through the school concert, has learned something about their place in the world that no lesson plan produces on demand.
The Poetry and Music Evening
The concert itself is a fixture, and it is gloriously unpolished.
The children write their own poems and read them aloud. The music is whatever the classes have been working on that term, which over the years has meant Beyoncé on the keyboard, “I Gotta Feeling” on guitar, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, ukuleles, xylophones, and — on one memorable occasion — the entire school playing “Funky Town” together.
Reading your own poem to a field of adults is a genuinely difficult thing to do when you are eight. The children do it anyway, and the newsletters record them coming off the grass visibly proud of themselves. That is the point of the evening. The repertoire is beside the point.
What the bandicoot is doing in this article
Schools describe their grounds in brochures. The description is always positive and it is almost never specific, so parents have learned to discount it.
We would rather tell you that in 2022 a bandicoot walked through the school concert, because that is the kind of detail you cannot invent and cannot arrange. It tells you where the school is, what surrounds it, and roughly how formal the evening was — all at once.
The concert happens every year. So, presumably, does the bandicoot.
Come and see the campus for yourself — book a tour.