The year was 2005. I had been appointed brass and percussion specialist teacher through a very loose translation of a job interview at the end of 2004. I had a Bachelor of Music, majoring in Composition, but no formal education qualifications. Yet.

For a day and a half a week, for nearly 3 years, I came in to the double storey wing on the Dimboola Rd site of Horsham College (then known as the senior site), to teach brass and percussion students and do up the weekly music timetable. This wasn’t what I had planned to be doing with my life but I quickly found myself loving being around people with the same passion for music as myself, and the amazing bonds I developed (and continue to enjoy) with so many brilliant kids.

The music department at that time consisted of the old Horsham High office space, a storage space, two practice rooms and two classrooms. One of those classrooms doubled as our rehearsal space for our ensembles. While none of this had been treated acoustically to be a music department, it was essentially my home away from home.

Insert a Graduate Diploma of Education (Secondary) here.

Now I was fully qualified, and as such, given the traditional baptism of fire by being loaded up with junior music classes. The learning curve was steep, but life was good.

Here, if you imagine a cheesy 80’s movie montage of merry music making (nice alliteration!), you would see several happy music staff working with many happy music students and generally having a great time.

Then it happened.

Genuinely it’s been so long now, as I’m writing this it occurs to me that it has all blurred a bit in the memory. I have to use other key moments in my life to get a reasonable bearing on when this all began, but I’m going to say 2010. Like so many situations in life, the events that followed were a result of money and property. We didn’t get any of one, and we lost some of the other. Specifically, the two best-condition wings in the whole school. I must point out here, this was nobody’s fault. The decision of the government at the time to allot much needed funding to the Special School was something nobody would deny. They deserved it, and they did amazing things with it. It just meant that we had to downsize.

Horsham College had to get creative with its timetabling, as we had lost about 20 rooms. Long story short, the music department was about to get the rough end of the pineapple. We had to move. In the grand scheme of things, where we moved to was, as described by one staff member at the time, palatial. The school bought in several portables, two of which were joined together and assigned to us. They were not acoustically treated or in any way remotely designed for music classes to happen in, but they were ours.

Some time down the track, Horsham College was given government funding to build the new school that was desperately needed. We had had it designed, we just needed the moolah to build it. We got approximately half the moolah we needed, so half a school was built. Unfortunately, the brand-new shiny music department was in the half of the design that wasn’t built. The vision of a single site school was still very much in the picture, but we were going to have to get doubly creative with our timetabling and room allocation.

Eventually when the senior site was moved to the new buildings we now recognise as Horsham College, the music department had no choice but to go where we would fit. Into A1 and A2. I can’t tell you, dear reader, just how much equipment the music department had in its possession at that stage. A major cull happened, and we dramatically downsized ourselves into 2 GPC’s (general purpose classrooms). One for ensemble rehearsals and instrumental lessons and one as a classroom. In terms of who was in the room and when, it was a delicate balancing act indeed. Despite the major cull of equipment, a lot was put into storage.

Insert another seismic shift here, and the music department found itself having to move again. What was the administration office in 2005 (on the corner of Remlaw Rd and High St North) had been reinterpreted as the year nine centre, which was now moving to a more on-site location. We were going to take their place. A definite improvement in our general situation. A massive new building with excellent teaching spaces, a huge office space and, most brilliant of all, my own personal toilet! The only issue we had was that we were functionally off-site. Students mysteriously found it possible to take 10 minutes to get to class, then complained when we let them out when the bell went because they had to traipse the apparently monumental distance of about 500m back to their lockers and recess or lunch would be half over by the time they got there.

We also knew, in our heart of hearts, that this wouldn’t be our forever home. We didn’t know how long we would be there, and to be honest, that had now been the case in every area we had been moved to. Everywhere was temporary.

Due to a situation that arose one day, it was decided that to avoid that same situation ever arising again, the music department would be moving to the northern building of the old Connect Ed buildings. This ensured that in emergency situations it wouldn’t take nearly as long for help to arrive. We had 2 days to make this happen.

I lovingly referred to this area as the pigeon roost, as that seemed to be its primary function. A family (or 3) of pigeons had been nesting in the rafters of this building for many years. One of the necessary elements of our tenancy here was the regular “de-pooing” of the covered area where students walked to access the building. During one of the 2020 lockdowns I completely desensitised my kids to all things rodent-related. I set up 8 mouse traps around the rooms and every second day I would come and check my success rate. My kids always came with me for a bit of fresh air (until they were inside the music department) and after a while would get up in the morning and excitedly ask me if today was “mouse trap day”. I even kept a running kill tally in the office. Over the longest lockdown of 2020, I believe I hit 110 mice.

Then word came that that building was to be knocked down and removed. I heard it from several sources but waited until it was officially confirmed with me. Sure enough, we were on the move again, but to where, who knew?

It turns out that history was to repeat itself, and we were headed back to A1 and A2 at the end of 2020. Familiar with how we had to utilise this teaching space, this has been temporary home number 6 in the space of 12 years.

But a new dawn breaks, and after effectively being the Partridge family music department for 12 and a bit years we have moved into our forever home. An area that has been acoustically treated, carpeted, ceilings lowered, double glazed windows and essentially made as musically friendly as budgets would allow. For this, I am relieved and genuinely grateful. As I write this, I am realising that 12 years of accumulated tension from simply not knowing what was going to happen next is starting to taper away. There’s quite a bit there and I think it will take a while for me to fully decompress, but I am happy to the point where secretly, I have wiped away tears. Just like I am now.

One thing I take away from all this history is the fact that no matter what was thrown at us as a department, we have strived to give our students the best tuition and experiences we could deliver. In the years that have gone, I can count at least 8 students that have gone on to make music their full-time career, be it as a working performer, an educator, AMEB examiner or other. This may not seem like many, but in the fickle world of the performing arts and as a rural school, this is remarkable. One past student recently told me how she has had to start declaring income as a performer for tax purposes. This was something she was equally devastated and proud of at the same time. I was beyond delighted.

So if we can do that while teaching out of pigeon roosts and even a bathroom at one point, imagine what we can do now. I can’t wait to find out.

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