We left our home in Ellerslie Grove - the only home I'd ever known - and set sail for the home of Ballarat's Cheapest Cars, Ballarat.

Making friends was difficult at first. I knew absolutely no one at Pleasant Street and was heading into the frying pan that is Grade One, where all that feel-good bullshit you learn in Prep is left behind, where you have to be a member of a posse or you'll be picked apart by vultures and where initiation ceremonies are brutal.

I asked Merlin if his name was really Merlin and he said yes and then I asked if i could play soccer with them and he said yes and then we were friends.

Brutal.

It was your standard Grade One affair, really; I remember cutting out those chains of paper people, playing with Lego, being jealous of one kid in my class who had a very cool Spiderman outfit. I remember the school held a Jump Rope for Heart event one day and Merlin had never learnt how to skip (bit crap for a wizard), so I taught him the classic 'jump when you hear the click of the rope hitting the ground' trick and by the end of the day he was skipping his own rope inside two larger ropes twirling around him and I couldn't even do the thing where you cross your arms.

And that shit stays with you for life.

But my most vivid memory of ye olde Ballarat (apart from the sight of Sovereign Hill, which is forever burned into my retina) is a shameful one. It begins with me trying to be a righteous hero, but ends with me being an idiot and never telling my parents about it.

Our class was going on a classic Ballarat excursion; a walk around Lake Wendouree. Though by all reports it seems to be in a bit of trouble now, this lake was the pride and joy of the city back in my day. It was a popular rowing spot, a pleasant place to have a picnic and Steve Monaghetti could be regularly seen running along the path that stretched right around the lake. The very path that we adorable Grade One students were walking on this sunny day, twelve years ago.

It was getting towards the end of the year at this point and being SunSmart was being sold to us youngsters as "cool". We all had our little caps or wide-brimmed hats on, me in a particular making a definite statement with my cap that had one of those miniature capes at the back to protect one's neck, sort of like a hat-mullet.

Anyway, as we walked, my friend Lyndon decided to have a little fun and ripped a kid's hat from his head, mockingly pretending that he was going to throw the hat into the sacred Lake Wendouree. The teachers up ahead, no doubt distracted by a urine- or Band Aid-related emergency, failed to notice Lyndon's taunting and this kid's genuinely terrified screaming. The boy was filled, as a Grade One student often is, with love for his hat.

Eventually, Lyndon became bored and his material grew old, so he returned the hat to its rightful owner, who was very upset indeed. Though the rest of the class decided to move on with the rest of their lives, I knew that an injustice had occurred and that the moment called for a saviour; a man amongst men who would rise up against the hat-tyrant and bring peace and democracy to the people.

So I thought I'd have a crack.

Quick as a chubby flash, I grabbed Lyndon's own hat - the source of all his power - and began to give him a taste of his own sweet medicine. I pretended that I would flick the wide-brimmed ornament into the lake and taunted him with the sweet irony of the whole situation, which frankly I think was lost on many of my fellow students.

Fake throw after fake throw, I taunted Lyndon and just managed to keep the hat out of his grasp with my Monaghetti-esque skillz. I was giddy with the excitement of rebellion and heroism; I was Robin Hood, I was the real Spiderman, I was Zorro! Surely nothing could possibly rob me of the moral high ground in these circumstances.

Turns out something could. My little fingers lost their grip on the brim of Lyndon's hat and it flew, frisbee-like, through the air and into the icy cold water of the lake. A gasp was let out by the millions who had crowded around to see my handiwork, and then everyone rushed to the water's edge just in time to see the hat float outside arm's length. It was a lost cause. Like a sodden, SunSmart duck, Lyndon's hat slowly drifted towards the centre of Lake Wendouree, never to be recovered.

Or replaced, for that matter. At the end of '96, my mum and brother and I moved back to Warrnambool and I never saw Lyndon again, having never apologised and having never paid for a new hat. I went back up to freezing cold Ballarat from time to time to visit my dad and to see Merlin now and again, but even years later I couldn't look at Lake Wendouree without feeling a pang of guilt.

Or seeing Steve Monaghetti.