Half a day at a remote community school

I’m staying with the school principal, who is a friend of mine. In remote communities the Education Department used to build big teachers’ houses, with three bedrooms and lounge rooms with lots of space for extra swags. Now they’re going for two-bedroom flats, so no-one has to share their living space unless they really want to. A sign of the times.

When I lived in a community, the teachers, especially the single ones, used to want their share of the visitors. We looked forward to checking out the legendary, long-bearded bilingual gurus from the Top End and other ‘experts’, and lots of useful conversations happened late at night in those big rooms or out on verandahs.

When I get up at 7.30, Bill has left a piece of toast and half a cup of coffee and gone off to pick up kids. The outstation school, 20 kilometres away along a dirt track, has been closed down, so he’s gone to bring the kids from there to the community school.

Later the school liaison officer, a local woman, will do a run around the community itself to pick up stragglers and kids who don’t get to school much. This happens in most communities. Some people think it should be left to the parents, but the reality is quite a few of them are still asleep, sick, hungover or too tired and hungry to hassle their kids to go to school – school might not have done much for them.

At this community, the school bus usually goes round to pick up kids. But there’s a new group school system, which means individual community schools have to fill out forms and get permission to buy everything, from a few exercise books to fuel for the bus. The bus is off the road at the moment because it’s out of fuel. Bill tells me he told the bureaucrats in town that1950s Russia would have been proud of them.

I’m here to help the Indigenous language program by taking classes out bush to learn more about local animals and plants. Although almost all the kids here, as in other remote communities, speak an Indigenous language as their first language, lots of words and knowledge are being lost.

The local linguist (til recently he was a bible linguist but that’s another story) has just started to co-ordinate the Indigenous language program at the school. He’s shocked that some of the children don’t know the language names for some of the common animals, like echidnas, which they call ‘porcupine’.

Indigenous language and culture programs are of course not the flavour of the month at community schools. Politicians, and so education bureaucrats, are desperate to improve literacy and numeracy – which has not got any better in the 20 years I’ve been in the Centre – and don’t want to give up precious school time to support the teaching of the children’s’ own language and culture.

This is like taking history and related subjects out of the education of English-speaking children. Maybe learning to read and write first in their own language isn’t the key to Indigenous literacy that the aforementioned bilingual gurus thought it was but, as an Aboriginal researcher said to me recently, language and culture programs are a vital part of giving kids a well-rounded education.

Indigenous language and culture is also where the kids have superior knowledge and don’t feel shamed, like most Indigenous kids often do at school. With all the current talk about closing the gaps between Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians, I often think of the huge gap between what the average whitefella and the average blackfella, at least in the Territory, knows about the bush.

Most of the kids in this community, where more knowledge has been lost because whitefellas came here early, know far more about native plants and animals and many other aspects of their country than most whitefellas, including scientists. Surely this knowledge is to be prized and built on, rather than considered worthless?

When I get to the school, I say hello to Mary (I’ve changed all the names), who’s wearing a black skirt and top and headscarf . One of the six young blokes from this community killed in a rollover a couple of months ago was her nephew. She’s hacked her hair, as people do for sorry business, and covered it with a scarf.

The new young whitefella teacher is sick – gutsache. He’s an OK teacher, Bill tells me, knows how to control a class, isn’t nasty. The Accelerated Literacy teacher has to take his class again today.

She’s an extra teacher the school got when they took on the AL program last year. I don’t know a lot about it, except that it’s the latest ‘cure’ for low literacy, at least in the Territory, and involves going over and over one text. The class has been doing ‘Henny Penny’, which has driven the new teacher so much up the wall that he’s changing to a new book.

Mary’s class is the first to go out bush with the linguist and me. All the kids pile excitedly in two troop carriers. When we get to a nearby waterhole, the kids race off to check out the traps I set the previous evening and grab the nets to look for more fish.

There hasn’t been much rain in the last 6 months and the waterhole is only waist-deep, but we find four types of fish, mostly finger-size or smaller. The linguist was hoping for some shrimps or yabbies, but we don’t catch any. It’s chaos but everyone’s having a good time. The linguist, who has a local wife and has lived in the community for decades, is very calm and kind with the children. Nothing seems to faze him.

It’s very hot, at least 40 degrees, and Mary doesn’t feel well, goes and sits in the shade of a troopie – there aren’t any trees near the waterhole. Wendy, who’s come on the trip because she knows a lot about animals and plants, says there were lots of drunks last night, she didn’t get much sleep.

Wendy doesn’t know all the fish – the knowledge of animals that weren’t eaten was always less, and is often scant these days. We make sure the kids all get to see the different fish we’ve found, then we put the fish back in the waterhole and the kids pile, dripping, into the troopies.

On the way back, we stop to look at trees. The linguist asks the children the names of river gums, bean trees and paperbarks, and describes them to the children in language. Paperbarks are important, because they usually meant there’s water if you want to dig for it.

Later I ask the linguist if he thinks the trip was useful or just fun. He says it’s so good to get all the kids out bush like that, some families don’t take their children out bush much at all.

Back at school, it’s recess time. The kids get given lunch now, because they get hungry if it’s later – they get breakfast at the school too, but some of them come too late for that.

The food money currently comes out of the government family payment; it’s one of the Federal intervention initiatives. The new Federal Government is talking about making this debiting of family payments for school lunches voluntary. The principal wonders how the hell that would work, having lunch for some kids but not others.
The school used to get money for school lunches from a grant, but those grants have been discontinued.

One of the Aboriginal teacher assistants comes up to me and says hello. All the classes that have a whitefella main teacher, also have an Aboriginal assistant teacher – a necessity especially in the younger classes, when the children don’t generally speak English well.

Hilda tells me she and the other trainee teachers are not allowed to do training at Batchelor College in Alice Springs any more. They have to stay at school with their classes. Local Aboriginal trainee teachers have always had jobs as assistant teachers at their community schools.

These jobs have always been a good incentive, as well as providing on-the-job training, a real context for their study, and a point for communication between Batchelor and trainees. Hilda seems to be saying that the Education Department has now forbidden this.

‘The Government wants to bring up teachers from down south,’ Hilda says, ‘they don’t want us.’ She’s angry. Whatever’s happened, it hasn’t been encouraging. Hilda was taken away and came back to this community as an adult. She expects the Government to be hard on her. She’s in her fifties, a grandmother now. ‘I wanted to retire with something’, she tells me, ‘ to have something I’d achieved’.

Mary goes home sick; the principal has to take a class now. I head out to a waterhole with the linguist and another class.