Noel Pearson

You know, I was on the beach down in southeast Queensland on 9-11.

lazing on the beach reading that book.

You know, I love popular history, so I read that back in 2001, and so I had this idea, well, we'll do a musical on the biography of the equation.

Now, may I tell you... I didn't know who could help us.

I actually thought, oh, well, we'll put a pastiche of popular music together and the kids can dance.

I was telling my colleague that the first song on my list, uncreative as I am, the first song was Diana Ross's... We're in the middle of a chain reaction.

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But that was going to be a pretty thin kind of production.

But there was this guy called David Collins White from Sydney, from Haberfield Public School, who was mentoring our music program at the time up in Hopevale.

And I approached David and I said, mate, I want to do a musical on this Badanas book.

on E equals MC squared so that I have a physics component to our extracurricular project.

And he and a guy called Chris Cohen, who's now the director of the Just Us Theatre Company in Cairns, they put together the lyrics and the music for this musical.

And the kids at Hopevale presented E equals MC squared a couple of months before Haberfield did.

And it was a fantastic production.

It was just so great to see these kids from this very multicultural school in Sydney.

They're kind of our sister school to our school up in Cape York.

They had hosted our music children at the op when David took them to the opera house for a music event that all these children were performing at.

So this relationship with Haberfield is five years old now.