MAGE Teaching Resources

On and off, for months, since I published my book in April 2020, I have been trying to track down a primary school teacher, Brenda Morcom, who had always encouraged my creative writing when I was in her Year 7 class in 1983.

We had a class story book, and when one of us had written what was, in her assessment, a good story, we were invited to copy it (longhand, in pen) into the class story book for that year. I had so many of these that I took to rolling my eyes at yet another request to laboriously rewrite my story, with my teacher mimicking my response and reminding me it was an honour!

All of my teachers had read aloud to us, and I still recall Mr Hussey doing all the character voices, and Mrs Marshall taking us to hear Colin Thiele, a well known South Australian author, at Writer's Week, after we had been reading his book one term.

But it was Brenda Morcom who put the idea in my head that I was not only a reader, but a creative writer. I began writing my first proper story over the summer holidays in 1984 after I finished primary school, but never finished it. My sister, who was two years below me, had taken what I had written to her class, and I later had a lovely note from her teacher that they had all thoroughly enjoyed the story.

I had last seen Ms Morcom at our 2003 school reunion, but I didn't get the idea for my book until a few years after that, and didn't have a completed book until seventeen years later. No one in school social media groups knew where she was, there no mention of her in either the phone directory or in obituaries. The last electoral roll listing was too many years ago, and led to an address with a since-bulldozed house.

In August 2022, I learned from one of her fellow teachers - my sister's teacher mentioned above - that she had died three years ago, before I even published the book. I know she would have enjoyed receiving a copy, even if she never read it, and perhaps feel a bit chuffed at her role and impact on a student all these years later.

Teachers: never underestimate the impact you have on students, even if it's forty years later and you never get to hear about it.