In fact, I’m well on my way to completing the non-fiction book I started writing over three decades ago. It’s about my family’s and my experience at an amazing little alternative school in Victoria back in the 1970s and 80s called Sundance.

I hope it will become more than an exercise in memory and writing for me! Will former Sundancers want to read it? Some might. Will it be a guidebook for those wanting to set up an alternative school now? I hope it will! With my experience as a parent of two children who attended Sundance and as a teacher on staff there for nine years, I learned so much about what worked and what didn’t. I hope my stories will help others more easily start out with some of our strengths and avoid some of the mistakes we made.

Most of what we did was either based on the ideas of educational innovators of the time or on our personal belief that children were all unique and needed to be permitted to develop at their own pace. We all wanted to provide them with interpersonal skills that would help them resolve problems peacefully. We believed that respect for each individual was basic and therefore all used first names and strove to treat each other as equals.

Back to work now. I have a lot of writing to do.