I google ‘the marter’ while I’m having breakfast on Tuesday, and it turns out there are Mater hospitals, including a big one in Brisbane where a lot of babies are born. So, that’s what Ms Vo meant when she said she was born at the Mater.

In Science, Ms Vo hands out a worksheet and tells us we have an hour to fill it in. It’s on ‘solids, liquids and gases’. It’s based on the whole term’s work and I’ve only been part of one lesson in which I said ‘bloody’.

‘Just do the best you can,’ she tells me as she puts the sheet on my desk. ‘Treat it as practice with our way of assessment.’

That, it turns out, is the worst aspect of it for me. I know a bit about solids, liquids and gases, but the worksheet feels as if it’s written in a foreign language. Question four is a Venn diagram. I’m supposed to show what I know, but all it has is three overlapping circles with ‘solids’, ‘liquids’ and ‘gases’ written in them. What kind of thing am I supposed to write? Am I supposed to give examples? It feels as if part of the question is missing, and it’s the important part that would tell me what to do.

So I just stare at it thinking this isn’t how we did it in South Africa. I thought fitting in here would be all about the Aussie words, so I worked hard to learn them. But it turns out it’s about everything.

Around the room, everyone else is working, answering questions. This is normal for them. Completely normal. It’s as if I’m on my own island, somehow separate from the rest of them, even though they’re sitting all around me. Max is writing notes all over the sheet. Harry is ruling lines. Ben is thinking, but it looks like real calm thinking and not blind staring panic. Beyond him, even Lachlan Parkes is tapping his pencil on his desk and working out an answer.

Max is definitely a nerd, but he’s not a bad guy. I’m pretty lucky Ms Vo picked him to show me around. I’m sure we had people like him in the class in Bergvliet, even if I was more with the hockey players then. He’s not Richard Frost. But Richard was never good at returning my skidder at handball, even if he was a great left wing at hockey. And Richard doesn’t have a quad bike.

In the end I make some notes on the worksheet. I don’t know if they’re anything close to right. Is dry ice where the circles for solids and gases overlap, since there’s no liquid phase? We had some of it at Bergvliet once, for Science. We even had liquid nitrogen and we froze things solid and smashed them. I wonder if they’ve done that here. It was fun. It’d certainly make the subject of solids, liquids and gases a lot more interesting.