But everything changed for the nine-year-old at Melbourne's Beaumaris Primary School when he was sexually abused by a teacher, Tony, in the mid 1970s.
It wasn't the first time Tony had abused the grade four student but during the school photo day, things escalated when the teacher abused him in a public setting as he was getting changed into his sports gear.
"During primary school, I began to despise teachers and other authority figures like him," Hank said in a statement read out to an inquiry into historic offending at Victorian government primary schools on Wednesday.
From then on, Tony's involvement in sports at school and in the community ruined Hank's experience of his childhood.
"Tony abusing me became linked to the very things that I loved," Hank said.
"I loved playing football, but my memories of that time now are dominated by avoiding Tony and the threat of being sexually abused."
Another victim-survivor Grant recalled how a Beaumaris teacher abused him and other students multiple times after he had showered at his holiday house.
The teacher had taken the boys to an abattoir where they witnessed cows getting slaughtered with a bolt guns, lambs and sheep being killed with knives and then put onto big hooks.
"The visions were awful. It was an implied threat that ... if we disobeyed him, this would happen to us," Grant said in a statement.
Hank's and other stories of children being sexually abused by teachers and the teachers who turned a blind eye continue to be aired at the hearing which is focusing on accountability.
The independent board of inquiry is examining abuse at Beaumaris primary and 22 other schools in the 1960s, up until 1999, where at least 44 children were abused.
The four teachers under the microscope had transferred between schools in Melbourne's southwest as the abuse occurred.
Hank recounted how another teacher had turned a blind eye to what had happened to him, which led him to keep his abuse quiet.
He pressed for change calling on the Victorian government to introduce tougher sentencing for perpetrators of child sexual abuse.
The inquiry was told there were also a number of missed opportunities for the education department and police to act on the crimes.
Kathleen Foley is leading the inquiry into historic child abuse at Victorian schools.
Victim-survivor Bernard said students at Beaumaris who got in trouble and were sent to the principal's office would use exposing sexual abuse by a teacher as a way of getting out of trouble.
"Bernard understood that at least some staff at Beaumaris knew what was happening and apparently did nothing," counsel assisting Fiona Ryan said.
She pointed to the 1882 Royal Commission into public instruction which revealed the department was aware of the risk teachers might behave immorally towards students and this was a risk that needed to be managed.
The Deputy Secretary of Victoria's Education Department David Howes also fronted the inquiry's second phase on Wednesday.
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