2-4-6-8!
WHO DO WE APPRECIATE!?
At my first primary school the houses were Aussie plant themed
Acacia 
Eucalypt 
Waratah 
Banksia 
At my second primary school after some federation era rich people
Hughes 
Greentrees (figure that one out)
Northcott 
Parkes
At my high school, after Olympians who went to the school
Jackson
Gould (Yes, Shane)
Ford
Neall
I went to a Catholic boys high school so all the houses were named after bishops. Just checked and they’re all still the same so presumably they haven’t been outed as didlers or enablers yet.
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Bold of you to assume that.
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Both primary and high school we just had house colours and that’s it. I remember it was very tribal in primary school with chants being made before carnivals etc. High school, no one cared less, it was more an opportunity to not go to school. Also doesn’t help that one of the houses in High School was “white” and it was filled with the smart kids. Got pumped in the athletics carnivals though.
But were the smart kids white?
I went to a selective school… 
Soccer was the most popular sport. At lunch we would play Whites vs the World, in which the “whites” team would be half filled with “the world”
Edit: Just realised how bad my use of apostrophes was there
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Hey I said yet
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It occurs to me now that our house points were bogus. They’d tally them on the board and then what? Then what!?
At least you didn’t go to Hogwarts… Think about the BS of trying your hardest throughout the entire year, only to realise some little shit breaking every single rule known to man, including almost killing his fellow classmates, manages to get all the points he wants…
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Half-squashed devon and tomato sauce sandwiches.
Pegging our fruit (apples, mostly) at pidgins in the playground.
Handball tournaments.
Tackle Bullrush, until they banned it because some wimpy kid broke their leg. We still played it at the risk of suspension.
Our Rubbish bins were those old school receptacles (with more dents than a golfball) and we used to sneak up on people and empty the contents of the bin over their heads…
Getting in trouble and sitting on the silver seats.
Oh, yeah, and this bloke, can’t forget him.
Getting the teachers whiteboard marker and drawing those spirals on the center bit of the fans.
Using the electric pencil sharpeners to grind down the sticks of chalk until you had enough for a pencil case full, and having chalk fights, until that got banned and all the blackboards replaced with whiteboards because the new kid was allergic to chalk and nearly died because of it.
Calling blackboards blackboards and whiteboards whiteboards and not having somebody go into anaphylactic shock over their naming.
Canteen lunch orders written on the back of a brown paper bag, and getting a meat pie, sausage roll and a chocolate milk for like $5, with change. I think if you mention the idea of your kid chowing down on a meat pie and chocolate milk and lunch nowadays, you get investigated by DOCs.
And that was just primary school. Good times.
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We used to have barkchip wars before they changed the big fist size barkchips for smaller ones. God those were the days.
I also remember our year 6 teacher. God he was a c*nt of a human being. He would give really really really strict instruction on assignments and you had to follow them to a tee. One of them was that, for some reason, you couldn’t use texta. Remember my mum helped me with one part where we had to draw a family tree. I was so proud of the thing, put in so much work that I went into school early to show the teacher. His first words were “is that texta?” I was devastated and he made me miss out on morning play to redo the whole thing. The same guy tried to pull me out of the advanced learning class for reasons like that, he was still teaching 5+5 (his argument was that some people may still not know it) and then to top it all off, the arsehole confiscated lollies off of us because we’d gone to a shop just down the road after school had finished…
The guy was a c*nt of the highest order. The other year 6 class went and did about 10 assignments throughout the year, we had 1 spread out over the same period…
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We used to play a game out the back of the squash courts at highschool (why the fuck a school in regional QLD had squash courts is a fucking mystery but I digress) that started as a form of brandings. Back of the court - multiple balls are thrown against the wall. If you fumble the catch you have to run and touch the wall before you get sconned. This evolved into bash ball where instead of only getting hit with a ball you could get punched by any and all until you touched the wall. 50 kids and half a dozen or more balls… mayhem.
We also had a running thing for years about just slapping each others legs to leave hand prints, giving dead arms, dead legs etc. Forehead slaps for a while too.
Casual brutality with very little actual malice about it.
Turning skipping ropes into lethal whips.
Oh that was good fun.
I remember trying out for the schools Rugby League team in year 6, and it was essentially glorified Oz Tag, and the only Islander kid in the entire school spear tacking our PE teacher. 
Gotta love pork barreling.
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Did you do brandings with the tennis ball?
Eh, that sounds like one of those stories about political correctness that the Murdoch papers go on about that is an exaggerated version of something else*. In any case, blackboards always had decades of writing on them and the poor teachers always had marks on their hands and pants.
*We were told the story of a school switching black sheep to rainbow sheep to not be racist. Apparently it’s an old-old-old story, even when we were told it, originating with a school doing variations to make the song more interesting, they’d change it each verse.
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INTERFERENCE!
With any circular object we could get our little hands around.
Cricket balls saw a couple kids get suspended, but that’s because one wound up through the teachers staff room and upset a teacher enjoying their morning coffee.
I was a bit tamer in high school. A bit.
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“Hey mate, can you pass the Skin colored pencil”
The skin coloured pencil in the Faber-Castell set is no more.
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