HSC nightmare 2.0

”I had no idea beforehand that my column was to be used in the exam”

Finally, validation as a parent. It’s been a long time coming. One of these very columns made it on to the English paper for the Higher School Certificate in NSW. I do hope a generation of 18-year-olds do not hate me now. The column was on Antarctica, a passion of mine. The question: “How does Gemmell explore the paradoxes within human behaviour in this piece”? The daughter alerted me with a text from her high school during lunch hour. She wasn’t sitting her leaving exams but word had spread. Her first question: Do you get royalties for this? Not that I know of. I had no idea my column was to be used. The exam was most likely formulated in some top-secret, concrete-walled Education Department bunker and all exam compilers were then shot to guarantee no leakage. OK?

I was chuffed – until an ABC-TV panel program got in touch with an idea for a segment that night. The plan was to record myself reading an extract from the column, then answer the question thousands of 18-year-olds had also just tackled. “Sure,” I agreed blithely, completely forgetting I hadn’t sat the HSC for many decades and exam requirements had changed somewhat. Then I hung up the phone and remembered, with horror, The Dream. That little nightmare I’d had for decades about entering the exam room completely unprepared and unable to do any questions, having forgotten everything.

So many nights over so many years I had been harangued by the stress of those leaving exams that had lodged somewhere deep in the entrails of my psyche. Now I was to answer within half an hour a Year 12 exam question all over again. On my own work. And tell the nation what I’d come up with.

The underlying question, human paradoxes, is a topic I examine almost every week on this page. Answering would be a doddle, surely. Yet now ABC Radio was also interested. The answer was to be discussed on the Drive program. No pressure. Dear reader, I was slaughtered on the airwaves. Eviscerated. Marked down for such misdemeanors as answering the question in a descriptive way, failing to include enough jargon and also failing to quote myself. (Reference my own work? Surely an indulgence too many.) I slunk away from what may have been a brief moment of glory like a dog with its tail between its legs; hoping no one had actually seen The Drum, or heard the Drive presenter unceremoniously award me a Band 2 – which hovers near a fail. She was my bridesmaid once. Yes, we’re still talking.

The lesson: never agree to critique your own writing, publicly, for the nation. But I take my hat off to all the school leavers sitting their exams right now. You’re magnificent – just walking into that room and being courageous enough to tackle the questions. I’d also like to tip a hat to our English teachers, who not only teach the jargon and hammer home the quotes but blow their students’ minds with what writing can be.

To wit, a recent text message from the aforementioned daughter. Late at night. Way too late. But forgivable, because she’d just been introduced to a bold new writer by her English teacher and couldn’t put down the tome. She texted, exhilarated, with a photo of his poetic page. ““I didn’t know writing could be this!” And as a writer, that’s the aim; to “make it new,” as Ezra Pound said.

The book? Killernova by the Bornean-Australian Omar Musa. His dazzling word play had ignited a fire that took me back to beloved English teachers long ago, and in that text message from a girl in wonder I was reminded of my own electrifying moments of discovery when introduced to new books, new ways; to tuning forks for words I’d one day write. So I salute our English teachers for doing the hard yakka, all the rubrics and contextual reasoning, but for also exploding young minds with the possibility of what writing can be, and do.