Pennant Hills High School was a masterpiece of brutalist architecture, a style the NSW Government preferred for its low-cost maintenance. To me and my fellow students, it was just ‘Penno’. The cold, concrete structure’s other claim to fame was that Max Dupain had photographed it.

From the corner bench where I sat, the surrounding windows looked straight into the bush. This seat was it, the point where the school met the wilderness of a thousand adventures. By glazing my eyes I could wander the muddy tracks. I knew the scrub and sandstone boulders from my after-school hikes. I could trek home through the bush to Dural north-west of here, but there were way too many creeks, creepie-crawlies, and red-belly blacks, and it was too far. Later, I discovered this tract of bushland spread all the way up to the Hawkesbury River, which separates Sydney from the Central Coast.

At the start of high school, lessons seemed designed purely for passing exams and passing the years until you reached escape velocity. Except of course for the useless but fun subjects like art and ice-skating. But I did love natural science. I was obsessed with rock collecting. My scrounged specimens had long taken over my family’s living room. 

The need to pass provided the impetus to focus on the curriculum. As the textbooks slowly seeped into my brain, the cold science classroom triggered my awakening to the cycle of life and the way everything around me interacted. My biology and geology knowledge began to meld together. As I learned about the earth—the way things lived, dissolved, and lived again— images started forming in my head. Abruptly, it all clicked into place. It felt like a brilliant discovery. 

I could see the strata of the earth forming and folding, breaking down into soil, being absorbed by plants which provided food and oxygen. Water molecules performed their endless dance from cloud, stream, ocean, and gas, over and over for millennia. The water I swam in and the water in my body, it was eternal. 

My fascination with life was somehow nurtured in the most sterile classroom I could imagine. What an odd place to think of when I give thanks for my personal eureka moment of finally discovering the earth and how it all made sense.