*****
Earlier this week, 34 students undertook a prefect leadership camp held at Yarramundi. These are their stories.
We arrived, stretched and were immediately stewarded into the dining room, a largish wood-covered space with a raised, separate, air-conditioned backroom at the opposite end of the room to the kitchen and food dispensers.
We were lectured about the obvious – no girls in boys rooms and vice versa; pick up rubbish and so on – but as the lecture drew on, we got our first hints of what Prefect Camp held in store for us. First, there seemed to be a very squeaky fan somewhere in the room, but as we left the building, the squeaks only seemed to get louder. And louder. And louder.
The birds, for miles around, chirped in the most annoying manner… incessantly. It strikes me as odd that something that loud, and that insistently chirpy survived evolution. How frigging difficult could it be to track down and eat something that has a homing device embedded in its throat? I guess all the predators got so annoyed by their squeaking and left; saying “Geez, it may be laughably easy to triangulate your position, eat you, then eat your two dozen birdy buddies, but come on. Enough with the noises already.”
I also found it ironic that we left the grey and concrete-clad city for a place that obviously prided itself on its natureyness, yet it still sounded like a multistory car park with cars constantly being locked. But enough on the birds. One of the other hallmarks of Prefect camp that we all grew to hate and loathe was the rain.
The rain at Prefect camp varied wildly from bucketing, pouring, drizzling, and – if we were lucky – threatening more rain. It rained on the way to activities, on the way from activities, and, ONLY if it was a water-event, during activities. But I digress.
A while after we left to pack, “Allstar” by Smash Mouth played over the loudspeakers. It was time for lunch. Lunch on the first day was Fish and Chips, and Pearson got his first taste of fish since primary school. After lunch, we had our first lessons on the true meaning of leadership. It was all very abstract, somewhat self-motivationy and – more importantly for this travelogue – deadly boring. In short, we got our first experiences of sitting in an air conditioned room doing nothing productive – excellent experience for the year of prefecting ahead of us. We did do “Acrostic Poems” to introduce ourselves to the Camp Coordinators, which were odd in that none of them rhymed and were in no way poetic.
Mine was:
Burns
Rhodesian
Elephants
Ntil
Dead
And
Nonrecognisable
Which I think sums me up quite nicely. We played more stuff, including testing our metaphor skills by giving us random objects off a table and asking us to apply it to leadership. Which definitely helped me learn to lead. Oh yes.
With our introductions introduced, we split into the two groups, and collaborated together to make group-names, mottos and group anthems.
Group Two, the good group, the one that the boys captain, boys acting vice-captain, girls captain and girls vice captain all came from (I was in it), chose for themselves the name the “Twotalitarians”, with the motto “We’re the leaders, deal with it.” The “Arthur theme song” was our devilish and fascist marching song.
The other group, Team 1, which grudgingly coughed up a Senior Prefect, had the name “Team Work”, with the motto “team what? TEAM WORK,” and “Prefect, prefect; HUAGH HUAGH,” proving their inferiority by their very motto, which was stolen from Farrer. I can’t remember their team song, but I have a suspicion it was the Pokemon song.
With all this sorted, the Twotalitarians went off to their first activity, Archery, a definitely useful leadership skill, as we learned yet more metaphors with no actual practical advantages conferred. We were further divided into sub-groups, which competed with each other in very leadershippy ways. (You could tell when I had my turn from the neat pile of arrows sitting on the ground two metres from the target.) When all was said and done, and the rain rolled back in, we went to our cabins for the first real bit of rest since arrival.
About half an hour later, “Allstar” by Smash Mouth played again, meaning dinner was being served. Dinner was Chicken Parmagiana. It was at this dinner the new meme of endless applause was introduced. The kitchen guy announced dessert, and we clapped. And clapped, and when the clapping died away, some people kept on clapping, making everyone else clap some more. The more clapping you do, the funnier it gets, until the simple act of applause is the epitome of hilariousness.
After dinner, there was another break, and at seven, “Allstar”, by Oh God Make It Stop played, signifying more paperwork. This, however, was a school thing, run by Ms Pinnington-Wilson and Mr Norris, and had to do with the Day Prefects hammering together their policies and strategies for the coming year – which meant that I, as a boarder, was boreder than all the others there.
After more mind-numbing tedium, because I was pretty much the only one there with no actual stake in the discussions, even if I took part, they let us go to bed. However, they made the crucial mistake of trusting us to actually go to bed, meaning that some people didn’t go to bed till 3:30. My cabin, taking advantage of the Gideon Bibles stapled to the wall next to every bed, regaled each other with stories from Leviticus – the nuttiest book of the whole Bible, before going to sleep at a reasonable time: half past midnight.
The next morning, we were woken by the sultry sounds of “Allstars” by My Life
Is Unceasing Torment (an emo coverband). After breakfast, we had a short break, followed by more Allstars, followed by Leadership training, followed by “Allstars”, which meant (for the Twotalitarians) Canoeing, followed by “Allstars” signifying lunch, followed by – the next actual interesting event at camp (for me), Raft building. (And “Allstars”)
As with Archery, we were split into sub-groups, each team building their own raft. Each was given 4 barrels, 8 planks of wood and a bunch of fairly short pieces of rope. Our team – the accurately named Team Uber – snagged Betcher, who has some experience tying knots, and developed this intricate blueprint, where the barrels were held some distance apart from each other using the planks, broadening the base of the raft and adding stability. There were two barrels on the port and starboard sides, and about a metre gap in the middle. The barrels were held to each other by planks running along the top, outer side and inner side, all of them held together by an intricate web of rope, hope, and Betchermagic.
The other team faired… less well. After some initial experimentation with a design similar to ours, they ended up ditching one of their barrels, before lining up all three of their remaining barrels on top of some planks, with more planks on top of that. I couldn’t be sure, as I wasn’t supposed to be even looking at their side, but it seemed as if the whole contraption was held together by wrapping some rope around the thing and granny-knotting it at the side. There was literally nothing stabilising it, no room for the requisite 4 people, and no way to paddle.
Well, it was time to see if our raft floated. We did our little sub-group chant (Team uber after three: one two three, UBER.) and lifted it towards the river. But first, a word about that.
The river I’m talking of was the Nepean River. It had algae crawling over every inch of the surface, with the occasional fully grown plant, using the four-inch-thick surface sludge as soil. Below the surface, there was seaweed: seaweed so thick that every time a paddle entered its midst, the rower had to keep a strong grip on his vessel to avoid being sucked into its murky depths. It was reminiscent of both the Dead Marshes from the Lord of the Rings and my clothes pile on “washing day.” Into this water, we four brave sailors hauled our flimsy craft.
It… actually floated. Like, consistently. There weren’t even buoyancy issues. So, we rowed out about 10 metres and watched our opposition struggle. After one of their ropes came undone before even reaching the water, we knew not to expect much, but when their method of getting ON their crappy boat started involving jumping onto it and praying, we were fairly firm in our supremacy. We celebrated our awesomeness by covering ourselves with seaweed. Except that when Harriet tried to get it, the barrel on which she sat turned sideways, throwing her off.
She climbed back on, and we celebrated with our sub-group chant: Team Uber after three: one two three –
We never said Uber, because at that precise moment, the entire raft somehow flipped upside-down, broke apart and exploded simultaneously. It was horrifyingly well timed. Horrifyingly. And since I am both light and a nonswimmer, I was ON the boat. I was lucky in that the segment of boat that I sat on remained floating for a while, but the Nepean River Gods (Sludgor and Seaweedeity) deigned that my floating was a travesty, and the barrel I was sitting on started sitting on me.
The other team, veterans of saving people from crappy rafts that they were, swam in and collected the ruins of our once mighty sailing vessel. We all had a laugh at the expense of the other team, and raced each other back to the showers to be the first to remove the sludge from our faces.
There was, on recollection, another great event that began on Day Two: The Puzzle. Ms Pinnington-Wilson, craftily sneaking real world examples of team-building into our free time, began a 1000 piece puzzle, of a Danish chateau and it’s reflection. This Puzzle became an obsession for me. I would find every moment I could to complete it, forgoing meals. First there was the Chateau itself, which you could figure out by following drainpipes and the roofline, along with distinctive features like the door. Then there was its virtually identical reflection, then… THE SKY. At least 40% of the Puzzle was either featureless sky or featureless water-sky. We who did the puzzle (Pinno, Morgan, Myself, Katie, and various transitory others) cried with joy when we discovered a faint whispery cloud formation that meant that we could fit together a whopping 9 pieces. At the end, there was an hour of solid effort, as the bus drew closer. We decided – and this is strictly confidential – that we would tell everyone we were done, then break apart the puzzle before anyone knew we were lying.
Also, on the second day, there was the meeting that had the possibility of changing the fortunes of any of its attendants: the Executive Election. Six Positions. Eighteen candidates (I think). Each had time to write and deliver a short speech, selling themselves to their peers. We joked beforehand that since Hurlstone was, uh, Hurlstone, the speakers could just go up in front of everyone and perform an interpretive dance. To our surprise, Phil Enego went up and did pretty much JUST THAT. (He also spoke and stuff, but so did everyone else, so it isn’t funny.)
Other highlights included Betcher/ Quyen’s line “I’ll put the YOU in school improYOUvement,” Vivec’s line “I don’t think this is the place for bragging about my leadership experience, position in the SRC or Interact work.” (Which is… kinda my fault. For reasons I won’t go into here, I delivered his speech, meaning that I screwed it up hugely, made people laugh at it, and Vivek ONLY got Vice-Captain, and Tom’s breaking off from his speech to obsess over Ellen in an incredibly stalkerish way.
The final night at camp was apparently a blast, as everyone enjoyed the weight off their shoulders that the Executive Elections provided; with something they called “Sting Pong.” However, I wasn’t privy to this young’n sport, being obsessively stuck doing The Puzzle. Once more, I went to bed at a reasonable hour – one thirty in the morning – because I needed to make some headway on the reflection before bed.
The last day flew past, because we did fun activities and minimal paperwork. Our group did do initiative puzzles with Chris, a camp coordinator with his own, unique style of 70’s retro sarcasm and hate, including the levitating ring and that thing with the mushrooms and the chocolate river. (Don’t ask.)
Then, uh, we went back to school. I’d witticise about that, but I have work to do, and 2,133 words is essay enough for anyone.
We arrived, stretched and were immediately stewarded into the dining room, a largish wood-covered space with a raised, separate, air-conditioned backroom at the opposite end of the room to the kitchen and food dispensers.
We were lectured about the obvious – no girls in boys rooms and vice versa; pick up rubbish and so on – but as the lecture drew on, we got our first hints of what Prefect Camp held in store for us. First, there seemed to be a very squeaky fan somewhere in the room, but as we left the building, the squeaks only seemed to get louder. And louder. And louder.
The birds, for miles around, chirped in the most annoying manner… incessantly. It strikes me as odd that something that loud, and that insistently chirpy survived evolution. How frigging difficult could it be to track down and eat something that has a homing device embedded in its throat? I guess all the predators got so annoyed by their squeaking and left; saying “Geez, it may be laughably easy to triangulate your position, eat you, then eat your two dozen birdy buddies, but come on. Enough with the noises already.”
I also found it ironic that we left the grey and concrete-clad city for a place that obviously prided itself on its natureyness, yet it still sounded like a multistory car park with cars constantly being locked. But enough on the birds. One of the other hallmarks of Prefect camp that we all grew to hate and loathe was the rain.
The rain at Prefect camp varied wildly from bucketing, pouring, drizzling, and – if we were lucky – threatening more rain. It rained on the way to activities, on the way from activities, and, ONLY if it was a water-event, during activities. But I digress.
A while after we left to pack, “Allstar” by Smash Mouth played over the loudspeakers. It was time for lunch. Lunch on the first day was Fish and Chips, and Pearson got his first taste of fish since primary school. After lunch, we had our first lessons on the true meaning of leadership. It was all very abstract, somewhat self-motivationy and – more importantly for this travelogue – deadly boring. In short, we got our first experiences of sitting in an air conditioned room doing nothing productive – excellent experience for the year of prefecting ahead of us. We did do “Acrostic Poems” to introduce ourselves to the Camp Coordinators, which were odd in that none of them rhymed and were in no way poetic.
Mine was:
Burns
Rhodesian
Elephants
Ntil
Dead
And
Nonrecognisable
Which I think sums me up quite nicely. We played more stuff, including testing our metaphor skills by giving us random objects off a table and asking us to apply it to leadership. Which definitely helped me learn to lead. Oh yes.
With our introductions introduced, we split into the two groups, and collaborated together to make group-names, mottos and group anthems.
Group Two, the good group, the one that the boys captain, boys acting vice-captain, girls captain and girls vice captain all came from (I was in it), chose for themselves the name the “Twotalitarians”, with the motto “We’re the leaders, deal with it.” The “Arthur theme song” was our devilish and fascist marching song.
The other group, Team 1, which grudgingly coughed up a Senior Prefect, had the name “Team Work”, with the motto “team what? TEAM WORK,” and “Prefect, prefect; HUAGH HUAGH,” proving their inferiority by their very motto, which was stolen from Farrer. I can’t remember their team song, but I have a suspicion it was the Pokemon song.
With all this sorted, the Twotalitarians went off to their first activity, Archery, a definitely useful leadership skill, as we learned yet more metaphors with no actual practical advantages conferred. We were further divided into sub-groups, which competed with each other in very leadershippy ways. (You could tell when I had my turn from the neat pile of arrows sitting on the ground two metres from the target.) When all was said and done, and the rain rolled back in, we went to our cabins for the first real bit of rest since arrival.
About half an hour later, “Allstar” by Smash Mouth played again, meaning dinner was being served. Dinner was Chicken Parmagiana. It was at this dinner the new meme of endless applause was introduced. The kitchen guy announced dessert, and we clapped. And clapped, and when the clapping died away, some people kept on clapping, making everyone else clap some more. The more clapping you do, the funnier it gets, until the simple act of applause is the epitome of hilariousness.
After dinner, there was another break, and at seven, “Allstar”, by Oh God Make It Stop played, signifying more paperwork. This, however, was a school thing, run by Ms Pinnington-Wilson and Mr Norris, and had to do with the Day Prefects hammering together their policies and strategies for the coming year – which meant that I, as a boarder, was boreder than all the others there.
After more mind-numbing tedium, because I was pretty much the only one there with no actual stake in the discussions, even if I took part, they let us go to bed. However, they made the crucial mistake of trusting us to actually go to bed, meaning that some people didn’t go to bed till 3:30. My cabin, taking advantage of the Gideon Bibles stapled to the wall next to every bed, regaled each other with stories from Leviticus – the nuttiest book of the whole Bible, before going to sleep at a reasonable time: half past midnight.
The next morning, we were woken by the sultry sounds of “Allstars” by My Life
Is Unceasing Torment (an emo coverband). After breakfast, we had a short break, followed by more Allstars, followed by Leadership training, followed by “Allstars”, which meant (for the Twotalitarians) Canoeing, followed by “Allstars” signifying lunch, followed by – the next actual interesting event at camp (for me), Raft building. (And “Allstars”)
As with Archery, we were split into sub-groups, each team building their own raft. Each was given 4 barrels, 8 planks of wood and a bunch of fairly short pieces of rope. Our team – the accurately named Team Uber – snagged Betcher, who has some experience tying knots, and developed this intricate blueprint, where the barrels were held some distance apart from each other using the planks, broadening the base of the raft and adding stability. There were two barrels on the port and starboard sides, and about a metre gap in the middle. The barrels were held to each other by planks running along the top, outer side and inner side, all of them held together by an intricate web of rope, hope, and Betchermagic.
The other team faired… less well. After some initial experimentation with a design similar to ours, they ended up ditching one of their barrels, before lining up all three of their remaining barrels on top of some planks, with more planks on top of that. I couldn’t be sure, as I wasn’t supposed to be even looking at their side, but it seemed as if the whole contraption was held together by wrapping some rope around the thing and granny-knotting it at the side. There was literally nothing stabilising it, no room for the requisite 4 people, and no way to paddle.
Well, it was time to see if our raft floated. We did our little sub-group chant (Team uber after three: one two three, UBER.) and lifted it towards the river. But first, a word about that.
The river I’m talking of was the Nepean River. It had algae crawling over every inch of the surface, with the occasional fully grown plant, using the four-inch-thick surface sludge as soil. Below the surface, there was seaweed: seaweed so thick that every time a paddle entered its midst, the rower had to keep a strong grip on his vessel to avoid being sucked into its murky depths. It was reminiscent of both the Dead Marshes from the Lord of the Rings and my clothes pile on “washing day.” Into this water, we four brave sailors hauled our flimsy craft.
It… actually floated. Like, consistently. There weren’t even buoyancy issues. So, we rowed out about 10 metres and watched our opposition struggle. After one of their ropes came undone before even reaching the water, we knew not to expect much, but when their method of getting ON their crappy boat started involving jumping onto it and praying, we were fairly firm in our supremacy. We celebrated our awesomeness by covering ourselves with seaweed. Except that when Harriet tried to get it, the barrel on which she sat turned sideways, throwing her off.
She climbed back on, and we celebrated with our sub-group chant: Team Uber after three: one two three –
We never said Uber, because at that precise moment, the entire raft somehow flipped upside-down, broke apart and exploded simultaneously. It was horrifyingly well timed. Horrifyingly. And since I am both light and a nonswimmer, I was ON the boat. I was lucky in that the segment of boat that I sat on remained floating for a while, but the Nepean River Gods (Sludgor and Seaweedeity) deigned that my floating was a travesty, and the barrel I was sitting on started sitting on me.
The other team, veterans of saving people from crappy rafts that they were, swam in and collected the ruins of our once mighty sailing vessel. We all had a laugh at the expense of the other team, and raced each other back to the showers to be the first to remove the sludge from our faces.
There was, on recollection, another great event that began on Day Two: The Puzzle. Ms Pinnington-Wilson, craftily sneaking real world examples of team-building into our free time, began a 1000 piece puzzle, of a Danish chateau and it’s reflection. This Puzzle became an obsession for me. I would find every moment I could to complete it, forgoing meals. First there was the Chateau itself, which you could figure out by following drainpipes and the roofline, along with distinctive features like the door. Then there was its virtually identical reflection, then… THE SKY. At least 40% of the Puzzle was either featureless sky or featureless water-sky. We who did the puzzle (Pinno, Morgan, Myself, Katie, and various transitory others) cried with joy when we discovered a faint whispery cloud formation that meant that we could fit together a whopping 9 pieces. At the end, there was an hour of solid effort, as the bus drew closer. We decided – and this is strictly confidential – that we would tell everyone we were done, then break apart the puzzle before anyone knew we were lying.
Also, on the second day, there was the meeting that had the possibility of changing the fortunes of any of its attendants: the Executive Election. Six Positions. Eighteen candidates (I think). Each had time to write and deliver a short speech, selling themselves to their peers. We joked beforehand that since Hurlstone was, uh, Hurlstone, the speakers could just go up in front of everyone and perform an interpretive dance. To our surprise, Phil Enego went up and did pretty much JUST THAT. (He also spoke and stuff, but so did everyone else, so it isn’t funny.)
Other highlights included Betcher/ Quyen’s line “I’ll put the YOU in school improYOUvement,” Vivec’s line “I don’t think this is the place for bragging about my leadership experience, position in the SRC or Interact work.” (Which is… kinda my fault. For reasons I won’t go into here, I delivered his speech, meaning that I screwed it up hugely, made people laugh at it, and Vivek ONLY got Vice-Captain, and Tom’s breaking off from his speech to obsess over Ellen in an incredibly stalkerish way.
The final night at camp was apparently a blast, as everyone enjoyed the weight off their shoulders that the Executive Elections provided; with something they called “Sting Pong.” However, I wasn’t privy to this young’n sport, being obsessively stuck doing The Puzzle. Once more, I went to bed at a reasonable hour – one thirty in the morning – because I needed to make some headway on the reflection before bed.
The last day flew past, because we did fun activities and minimal paperwork. Our group did do initiative puzzles with Chris, a camp coordinator with his own, unique style of 70’s retro sarcasm and hate, including the levitating ring and that thing with the mushrooms and the chocolate river. (Don’t ask.)
Then, uh, we went back to school. I’d witticise about that, but I have work to do, and 2,133 words is essay enough for anyone.
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