Your old school is never quite how you remember it. The size is all skew-whiff, the walls seem to have moved and it's a sea of new faces. Plus, surely it has shrunk somehow?
So it was for me stepping back into Mount Rogers Primary School on Wednesday morning, which marked its 50th birthday by opening two time capsules from 1990 in front of an assembly of current and former students and staff.
Education Minister Yvette Berry joined the school's principal, Felicity Levett, to rifle through the contents of two large sealed pipes which had been buried by the front door of the school more than three decades ago.
Out came a school dress with a one-cent coin in its pocket. Had any of the current cohort of students ever seen such a thing? Good luck finding anything for that price at the canteen these days.
Then came a school flag from the days when the school was known as Melba Primary, along with the house flags named in honour of female Australian opera singers. This was in the suburb named for Dame Nellie, after all.
Another important rediscovery was the once official school spoon. Who knew? Perhaps a new one will find a spot in a fresh time capsule, due to be buried later this year.
Former students spoke of the good old days: no fences around the playground, walking to and from school, friendships formed at five years old and sustained in the many decades since. The first principal, a stern but fair man, had potatoes planted in his nearby front garden.
Kate McMahon, one former student, asked the current crop of students how old she might be if she was five in 1973, when she came to the school in its first year.
"Are you 100?" one in the front row of kindergarten students wondered.
"No, I'm not 100!" Ms McMahon said.
Memories were shared of the haunted part of the school. No, it wasn't really haunted, but a generation of students - including me - thought the stretch of darkened, mothballed classrooms in a period of low enrolments probably was.
The school is now at capacity - a far cry from the era in which it was earmarked for closure in 2006 - putting thoughts of ghosts and cobwebs completely out the window.
Ms Levett said a 50th birthday was a fabulous milestone for the school to mark.
"Then and now Mount Rogers Primary School has been such a safe and inclusive place for the students of the region to come to and I'm such a proud person at the moment to be a principal on this very special day," she said.
Though I was a student there for just three of those 50 years, walking through the school brought back a stream of long-forgotten memories of my early childhood.
And was a reminder why schools and their communities are so intertwined.
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