Her conversation is fast and feverish, as though her return had been a cosmonautical splashdown in Lake Burley Griffin after a successful space mission.

Her expedition to the US Space and Rocket Centre was doubly successful because she won (from a class of 55 campers) the coveted Right Stuff medal (as seen in our picture), of which she is just as proud as our Glasgow athletes are of their gold medals.

Smith was chosen by the Australian Scholarships Group(ASG) to go to the Space Camp as part of her prize in ASG's National Excellence in Teaching Awards.

Space Camp, she chirruped excitedly, puts its participants through some ''completely authentic'' astronauts' tests and training of varying degrees of rigour and terror.

For example, she was strapped into a multi-axis trainer. Rolling and tumbling and ''being pulled in all directions'', Smith sampled what a weightless astronaut might experience in furious conditions in space.

Participants were put into competitive teams, she recalled with delight, and as part of Team Destiny, Smith had to simulate two missions (Shuttle and Orion), one of them aboard a virtual space shuttle. ''My role as a mission specialist within the shuttle was to operate eight different control boards,'' she explains.

She says there were lots of tests of her long-forgotten, or never even learnt, maths and science, but for those of us who are a bit timid or sedentary, it is tales of the scary physical things she had to do that ashen our faces.

She particularly remembers how ''six of us were put in a great big canister and, from 30 metres, were dropped into a big lagoon'' as a test of how well they would cope, of ''how resourceful, accountable and reliable we'd be if we were in a helicopter and it crashed into the ocean''.

Smith must have impressed, because at the end of the character-building week, she was awarded her class' Right Stuff medal. The citation that comes with it praises her as ''a beacon of what's wonderful in the world'' – something that would go to the heads of some of us.

We wondered whether, having been a virtual cosmonaut and beacon of what's wonderful in the world for a heady week in Alabama, she was going to find being back on humdrum Earth in average Hughes a bit of a challenge.

But Smith says she's all set to busily invest what she learnt in virtual space in the work she does with children and teachers.

''It's changed me. I was a learner [at the space centre]. I was right back in the seat of being a complete learner. It will have changed my personal leadership style, this firsthand experience of being completely daunted by what's expected of me [but somehow managing to do it].''

She hopes she, in turn, will now be better at helping the daunted. What's more, she's such a convert to the right stuff the Space Camp can do for the right sort of people, she's going to start fund-raising to get ''five – at least five – of our finest year 11 and year 12 students'' with proven flair for the right academic subjects over to Space Camp''.

Rocking horses – up there with teddy bears as one of the most comforting toys for children – may never seem quite the same once you've seen Tom Buckland's rocking zombie sheep, his Uncategorized nostalgic memory #1.

This little nightmare is part of the ANU School of Art's exhibition #Sculpture.

#Sculpture is ''a survey of diverse contemporary sculptural practice by third- and fourth-year students of the school of art sculpture workshop'', the school says.

We visited on Wednesday and ''diverse'' understates a show brandishing works as different as Buckland's sombre zombie sheep and Gemma Sue's cheerful #What's On Your Mind? installation – made from dozens of abandoned mobile phones and webs of bright-red copper-coloured wire – which celebrates the art form of our times, the selfie.

''This [the rocking sheep] is a response to memories of drought, changing landscapes and childhood experience [on his family's farm near Oberon in western NSW],'' Buckland explains. ''It's made from a discarded rocking horse from an Oberon second-hand shop and a sheep skull from my family's farm.''

Perhaps because we've been to too many soul-scouring Ingmar Bergman films lately (at Arc cinema, closing soon but going down in a blaze of Scandinavian misery), we tried to get Buckland to disclose the deeper meanings, the Bergmanesque allusions to love and death behind Uncategorized nostalgic memory #1. Alas, he wouldn't indulge us and invites everyone to see what they want to see in it. He says we can even find it ''amusing'' if we wish.

In that case, this columnist chooses to find the work bleak, pitiless and despair-making, like one of Arc's Bergman films.

#Sculpture continues in the school of arts' Foyer Gallery until Saturday.