“Oh yes, I can see just like myself and all that went to school, even now, just walking in,” she said.

“And I even remember the school teacher’s name that taught us, and his name was called Maurice Murphy I think, but they called him Maury Murphy.”

Linda said she loved the Goonoowigall one-room schoolhouse, which she attended as a little girl for four or five years in the early 1950s.

She walked in with her siblings and cousins from Sheep Station Gully, carrying her leather schoolbag, lunch satchels, and enjoying daily milk deliveries.

After those initial years, the Connors family moved to Ashford, and then Tingha, where Linda completed her studies, but the little Goonoowigall School seemed special to the former student as she gazed about the room.

Linda said the desks in the main room are the same desks she sat in as a child.

“And look, it’s much smaller now, but when I went to school, it looked bigger,

It seemed as if the teacher was way, way up there,” she said.

Linda put her finger in the hole on a desk where ink pots once fit, and smiled, remembering some naughty classmates.

“The boys used to get in trouble with the ink jars because back in those days they only used to have the old pens, that you dipped in the ink, and they’d be flicking them around the classroom,” she said.

The building is on schedule for an overhaul with a $20,000 Family and Community Services NSW grant received by the Pioneer Village Trust.

The old wood building was relocated to the village in the early 1970s.

It will be lifted and placed on a concrete pad, the white ant damage repaired and a new coat of paint.