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Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories
Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories
Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories
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Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories

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From beyond the black stump to the Australian Alps; in schools on stations, missions, mines and over the air, it takes a special kind of person to be an outback teacher.


Back then, not only did we have to teach the three Rs but also sewing, arts and craft, music, physical education - you name it. Plus there were the duties of gardener, cleaner, nurse, registrar, office administrator, free milk dispenser, librarian and, on occasions, school bus driver. Oh, and in one school I was even responsible for 'mother craft'. And being male and just nineteen, as I was at the time, you might imagine my surprise when a young girl asked me, 'Sir, what's the best milk for babies?'

Master storyteller Bill 'Swampy' Marsh has travelled the width and breadth of Australia to bring together yet another memorable collection of stories. This time he has met with many of our extraordinary outback teachers and their students whose recollections so perfectly capture those special days of growing up in the bush.

 

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 1, 2016
ISBN9781460702116
Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories
Author

Bill Marsh

Bill ‘Swampy' Marsh is an award-winning writer/performer of stories, songs and plays. Based in Adelaide, he is best known for his successful Great Australian series of books published with ABC Books: More Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (2007), Great Australian Railway Stories (2005), Great Australian Droving Stories (2003), Great Australian Shearing Stories (2001), and Great Australian Flying Doctor Stories (1999).

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    Great Australian Outback Teaching Stories - Bill Marsh

    Introduction

    During the research for this book my partner, Margaret Worth, and I went on a nine-thousand-kilometre, six-week trip from Adelaide, up to Broken Hill, Wilcannia, Bourke, Hungerford, Cunnamulla, Longreach, Winton, Normanton, Karumba, Mount Surprise, Mareeba, Port Douglas, Cairns, Ayr, Rockhampton, Brisbane, Alstonville, Nimbin, Taree, Gosford, Oberon, Darlington Point and back home across the Hay Plain. During that time I interviewed many, many people, not only for this book but for future books to come.

    It was a very special trip through just about everything that this land could toss at us; through drought-stricken central-western Queensland, where we arrived in Winton just hours after the Waltzing Matilda Centre was burnt down. You really had to feel for those people. Down but not out; never. Then it was from the shorts’n’ T-shirt weather of the Gulf Country to being rugged up while driving through snow storms, while we wended our way up to the central tablelands to the town of Oberon.

    Along the way there were many, many highlights. There was being a guest on Broken Hill’s School of the Air, where the students were rehearsing a song I wrote — ‘It’s a Miracle’ — which they’ve since performed at the Barrier Schools Choral Festival (you can see it on YouTube — search for ‘SOTA Choral Festival’). We also managed a weekend visit to the lava tubes at Undara Volcanic National Park, west of Cairns. But for me, it was the people that I got to meet and interview that made the trip so special. I’d like to thank those who looked after me and us during the journey. Their kindness, openness and hospitality is, and was, greatly appreciated.

    We are a country, not only of amazing beauty but also of amazing people. Those that I interviewed may not be ‘famous’ or even well known but they are the heart and soul that make this country tick.

    I hope to see you out on the road, somewhere.

    A Great Sense of Community

    Definitely one of the highlights of my career was my time teaching in small towns throughout Western Australia. Many just one-teacher schools. Actually, at one place, there wasn’t really a town at all, just a school building stuck out in the middle of a wheat paddock. But as the head and only teacher, teachers like us were responsible for the education of all those attending the seven primary grades, plus you may well have had to keep an eye on a couple of high school correspondence students as well.

    Back then, not only did we have to teach the three Rs but you could also add on the tasks of sewing teacher, arts and craft teacher, music teacher, physical education teacher, manual teacher — you name it. Plus there were the duties of gardener, cleaner, nurse, registrar, office lady, free milk dispenser, librarian and, on occasions, school bus driver. Oh, and in one particular school I was even responsible for ‘mother craft’. And being male and just nineteen, as I was at the time, you might imagine my surprise when a young girl asked me, ‘Sir, what’s the best milk for babies?’ No, it wasn’t Sunshine milk or cow’s milk.

    Taking all that into account, those men — and it was really only male teachers back then — they really provided a first-class education and, what’s more, that education might well have been achieved in schools with no electricity and very little funding. Now, from my point of view, there’s three reasons for those children receiving such an excellent education: firstly, the teachers in these small communities were, on the whole, naturally dedicated and motivated; secondly, they had special training in teachers’ college; thirdly, they were also men who wanted promotion. And in those days, the quickest way for promotion was to go through the one-teacher schools, then on to the two-teacher schools and so on, up the ladder.

    In addition, we had a superintendent who visited the school for the express purpose of ‘marking’ our efforts, and without a satisfactory mark there was no promotion. So it was necessary for you to put in the effort. As a result, students were not only given a sound grounding in the three Rs and other subjects but, because it was impossible for the teacher to constantly attend to each grade, the students had to learn to work on their own. Thus they became very independent, which is extremely important.

    Then of course, in all the small places I taught at, there was an amazing sense of community. If anyone within that community was in trouble or whatever, everyone rallied around to help and that kindness and thoughtfulness was transferred to the children.

    So there were many advantages in being educated in those smaller towns. And onto a more serious note, it’s my feeling that today’s country children are the poorer because many of those towns fell into decline when the push came to close the smaller country schools and amalgamate them with the schools in the larger country towns. And once the school went, so did the town. I’d even go so far as to say that the state of Western Australia and the country of Australia, as a whole, is the poorer for this fact.

    Anyway, as I was saying, I taught in many one-teacher schools in Western Australia and the thing I was most amazed about was their great sense of community. A case in point was an experience I had while living in the township of Harrismith, in south-eastern Western Australia. It was a single-teacher school — me. We didn’t have piped water so there was no garden. There would’ve only been about twenty-six children in the school, ranging from Grade 1 through to Grade 7. With only four families living in the town, the balance of students came from the outlying farming area.

    And it was the wonderful community of Harrismith that, when I suggested I’d like to take a group of present and ex-students to far-off Canberra, was right behind me. It was to be a two-thousand-mile round trip. The neighbouring town of Tincurrin was also invited and the two communities joined together to raise funds for the trip.

    Twenty-nine children between the ages of ten and seventeen were chosen to go. It was during the August/September holidays of 1967. My wife was the chaperone and I was the teacher. The cost for each student was the equivalent of seventy-five pounds and, for a group of farm kids who were preparing to travel all the way across the Nullarbor, there was all sorts of excitement and expectations. One that really stands out was Vicki. During packing, Vicki’s mum noticed that her daughter had put an empty jar into her case.

    ‘Why the jar?’ asked the mum, to which ten-year-old Vicki replied, ‘I’m going to bring you back some snow, Mum.’

    On departure day the children were transported by car the two-hundred miles or so to the Perth railway station. Then it was Perth to Kalgoorlie, where we changed trains; Kalgoorlie to Port Pirie Junction, another change of trains; Port Pirie to Adelaide, a further change of trains; then Adelaide to Melbourne. From Melbourne we travelled by bus to Canberra. In all it’d taken us a total of four days to get to Canberra. Then we spent a week in Canberra sightseeing and going to museums and galleries. And the kids were rapt. Of course, the real highlight was the snowfields. I don’t think any of them had seen snow before. So it was a great experience and an educational one at that. One they’ll never forget. And of course, such an adventure as that was only made possible due to the spirit of co-operation and that great sense of community that was alive and well in so many of our small country towns. So let us hope we don’t continue to lose those little towns.

    But anyhow, as to just how successful that particular trip proved to be, I believe it’s summed up in a letter from one of the older boys, an ex-student, and I quote:

    Dear Graham and Val,

    Seeing I missed out on seeing you at the station on Friday I thought it might be an idea to write and say how much I enjoyed the trip. I don’t mind telling you that when I was first told that I was going on the trip I was not over-keen mainly because I didn’t know what to expect! Well as time progressed and I learnt more about the whole thing, finally I was looking forward to our day of departure.

    Also before we went away I didn’t really know either of you. Now I think I can safely say that you are two of the most go-ahead and determined people I have met. I hope that in the future when you take groups on tours such as ours, as I believe you will, that they too will receive the same amount of enjoyment and interest as I did.

    In closing all I would like to say is thank you for making the trip available to me and all the others concerned. I have learnt a lot educationally and otherwise.

    Yours and many thanks

    So, there you go.

    A Yearning to Teach

    In memory of John Cox

    I started off my schooling as a six-year-old at a convent school in Bunbury, which is a port city, a bit less than a couple of hundred kilometres south of Perth. I was in Bunbury until I was about nine then we moved to a small place just east of Perth, called Toodyay. This was just before the outbreak of World War II. Toodyay’s in what’s known as the Wheatbelt region of Western Australia. I then attended Toodyay State School and worked in a grocery shop at weekends for pocket money.

    My family was a railway family. My father was in the railways. Even my father’s wife’s father had been in the railways, so I guess I was destined for a future in the railways as well. Though probably for most of my life I had this strong yearning to become a teacher. Somehow I had this deep desire to read and to learn. I believe that came about through the actions of an extremely wise headmaster who was at Toodyay School. When I was about twelve or thirteen this particular headmaster decided that it would be a good exercise for some of the older students, which included myself, to go and listen to the junior kids read in the shed at the school. I really enjoyed doing that and thus, the seed was sown. As best I can recall, that was when I first had that very real feeling of how I’d love to have a career as a teacher.

    But this was during the post-war years when things were pretty tough. There were only four state high schools that accepted boarders, and to go to one of those meant your parents had to pay for your board and all that sort of thing. Unfortunately, like so many other families around at that time, my parents were just not in the position to do that. Back then, due to various circumstances, the majority of kids in those bush schools left when they were fourteen. They either went out on the family farm to work with their fathers, or got other jobs to help support the family economically. Anyhow I was fortunate enough to continue on for an extra year and I completed what they called a ‘Junior Certificate’. Then at the age of fifteen I followed in my family’s footsteps. I went into the railways where I had a successful twelve-year career, working at quite a number of country railway stations throughout the state of Western Australia.

    I married during that time. My wife, Nancy, was a qualified teacher and the common feeling was that it was she who coerced me into teaching. Though that certainly wasn’t the case. As I said, I always had that underlying yearning to teach. But I must say, thank heavens to the generosity of Nancy, she said to me one day, ‘John, if you really want to be a teacher then you should do so, and I’ll offer you all the support I can.’

    There was a drastic shortage of teachers during that era and so at the age of twenty-eight that’s what we decided I should do. I had a special interview and did a short eight-week qualifying course. I was then accepted into Graylands Teachers’ College and Nancy and I began our two years of having to live on not very much at all. Graylands has since closed, which is a shame because all of us student-teachers were very proud of ‘our place’, as we called it. In fact we helped develop it.

    For example: seeing that Graylands had originally been an old abandoned military camp, all of us students put aside a certain period of time each week to go out and help work on the grounds. A simple exercise like that really builds one’s pride in the place. It certainly did with us anyway. It made us feel as though we belonged there; that the college was a part of us and that we were a part of it. Also, with Graylands being smaller than most colleges, us students were able to form much stronger relationships with staff who, in turn, came to understand our problems and were close at hand to help us out if and when the need arose.

    Actually, my being able to go to teachers’ college really came about because of Gough Whitlam’s dictum of how you should allow a thousand blossoms to bloom. He believed that just because so many of us were unable to complete our high school education during our younger days, that shouldn’t stop us from being able to attain our goals later on in our lives. And he was proven right, certainly by our intake at Graylands he was. From this qualifying course I told you about, I think something like thirty-two people were accepted into Graylands and, of those, there were about twenty-four who got through, of which a fair number went on to attain higher level educational qualifications such as doctorates and masters and further degrees.

    But it wasn’t all easy sailing. While I was at Graylands, our first baby arrived. So then the big thing was, How on earth can we continue? But we had a lot of external support and Nancy remained extremely supportive of me and we got through it, together, and I graduated. So for someone from my background to gain my teaching degree was particularly rewarding for myself, personally. It was also a great achievement for Nancy who, as I said, not only remained supportive of me but she took on the job of raising our first child through that period of our lives.

    After graduating from Graylands, I went on to have a very enjoyable and successful teaching career; one that spanned almost thirty-five years and found me working in so many varied and wonderful schools throughout the state of Western Australia. During that time, as it is now, if you wanted to get ahead in the Education Department you had to further your studies. To that end, while I was teaching, I also continued my passion for learning and I studied externally for a number of years until I eventually obtained my masters degree.

    Abraham Ant

    I retired from teaching about three years ago and so now that part of my life is done and dusted. These days I just read books. Do a bit of art. Take it easy.

    Anyhow, back in the early ’70s, after I graduated I taught at a place in Brisbane called The Gap. I’d been there for about three years when I decided to apply for a transfer. I was still a young, single guy so I had a look around and I thought, well, Bundaberg looks like the spot; you know, good beaches, a nice relaxed lifestyle — all that. So I put in for Bundaberg and I got notice that I was going to Kowanyama Aboriginal Mission instead.

    I really hadn’t ever been out of Brisbane and so I said to my father, ‘Where the hell’s Kowanyama?’

    Eventually he found it on a map, about as far away from Bundaberg as you can get, away over on the Gulf of Carpentaria side of Cape York Peninsula, in Far North Queensland. Basically how you get there is that you find your way to Cairns then head as far west as you can and you’ll hit Kowanyama just before you hit the waters of the Gulf. It used to be known as the Mitchell River Mission.

    I still remember my arrival as clear as day. The department had provided me with a train ticket but because of the ’74 floods it was impossible to get up to Cairns by train and then over to Kowanyama by vehicle. The only way was to fly in by a Bush Pilots Airways’ DC 3 plane. And if you remember the old DC 3s, when you walked down the aisle it was like walking up a hill, which was an experience in itself. There were three of us teachers on the plane that day: the principal and another guy who’d gone through teachers’ college with me, plus myself. So we’re flying into Kowanyama in this DC 3 and I was talking to the guy I’d gone to college with. Postings were on a two-year cycle and he’d already been in Kowanyama for a year. He was experienced, sort of. It’s as dark as hell outside, foreboding black clouds, pouring with rain, and I said to him, I said, ‘How long before we get there?’

    He said, ‘Look out the window,’ and when I did all I could see was a mirror of water right out to the horizon. ‘Take a closer look,’ he said. So I looked down through the sheeting rain and there’s this little tin shed away down below. ‘That’s it,’ he said.

    Not long after that, and much to my relief, the plane came in to land. But instead of landing, the pilot skimmed the plane over the airstrip before taking off again, back into the clouds.

    ‘Oh don’t worry,’ my mate said, ‘the pilot’s just buzzed the airstrip to frighten the crocs and cattle off.’ He said, ‘With so much water about they take to the higher ground of the airstrip.’

    ‘Oh,’ I said. So then we came around again. In we went to land and when we pulled up, I looked out upon a sea of black faces.

    ‘You’ll be right,’ he said. ‘They’re pretty friendly.’

    Those were the laid-back days of the long socks, the shorts and the open-necked shirt. So we got out of the plane. It’d stopped raining, thankfully, and I’m carrying my suitcases — all my worldly belongings — over to the Kowanyama air terminal. The terminal was pretty basic, not much more than a nine-by-nine-metre shed, really. Anyhow we’re nearly there and down it came again — the rain — and so we all run over to get into the terminal. Now, we’re all crammed into this tiny shed. It’s stinking hot — humid. I’m surrounded by dark people. There’s all the different and unusual smells and, being the new boy, I’m standing there, gripping onto my suitcases, and the black chicks, they’re squeezing in around me and they’re pinching me on the bum and they’re going, ‘Hey, ’ere’s a new whitey.’

    Frightening, it was. Just frightening. It was like all the locals in the area had come down to check us out. I only found out later that, because there was only a primary school at Kowanyama, a lot of them were there to see their teenagers fly out to Cairns to go to high school. So that was my introduction to Kowanyama; into this little six-teacher school with all these Aboriginals. I was just going on twenty-four.

    Back then there were about seven hundred Aborigines living on the mission with about thirty whites and, of those, there were six male teachers. No females. They weren’t allowed because the place was pretty rough and the Department of Education thought that it was unsafe for white, single female teachers. It was a two-storey school; high-set with a metre-high concrete slab underneath so, if it poured with rain, you’d be able to get out of the rising water. The military had actually partly paid for the construction of the school. I think they were still worried about Indonesia back then and they felt that if it came to war they could turn the school into a hospital.

    There were about a hundred and eighty students — all Aboriginal. Only in my second year were there some white kids. That’s when a guy who’d been the security guard for Joh Bjelke-Petersen moved up there with his family as the police sergeant. And it was quite interesting how his daughter was treated by the Aboriginal kids. To be accepted she basically had to take on the mannerisms of the Aborigines otherwise the girls in particular would’ve really got stuck into her. It wasn’t so much an initiation; it was more like she had to learn their cultural ways. For instance, in a normal white school you’re taught to look into people’s faces when you talk to them but with the Aborigines you never do that. You bend your head away. Yes, so that was interesting.

    Teacher housing was pretty good. The principal and two teachers were in one of the houses and myself and the two others were in another. Then about once a year a school inspector would turn up. He’d have a bit of a look around and say, ‘You’re doing very well,’ then nick off back home to Cairns. The first principal I had there, at the end of each term, he used to get the kids and, along with the staff, we’d all give the school a good clean. After he left, that wasn’t carried on and so things went downhill, which was unfortunate.

    For recreation I’d do stuff like go hunting with guys from one of the tribes. I had a motorbike and I’d head off with my bow and arrows over to the beach at the mouth of the Mitchell River — hunting for sharks and stingrays mainly. No boats, just walking through the water, and you’d see a shark come in the shallows chasing fish so you’d have a go at it. And I survived. I’ve still got two legs and all my toes are intact. They were good-sized sharks too, up to three metres long. Then, with the stingrays, you’d just arrow them in the flipper and they’d go around in circles, and you’d fish them out. But the sharks were more for fun, or so it seemed at the time. We didn’t eat them. Actually it was interesting how the different tribes had their own distinct totem. Like one time one of the guys caught this gigantic groper in our back creek — real ugly-looking things they are — but because it was the totem of that tribe they couldn’t eat it, so we had to give it to another tribe to eat.

    Another day I went out with one of the tribes and we happened to look back and see all this smoke coming from the community. When we returned we were told that one of the locals had accidentally burnt down the community hall. Now that hall was the place where they showed their movies and where they held their boxing. Both were popular pursuits up there. It was also their pub, which was even more popular. Up there they were limited to four cans per person, each night, and because the hall had been burnt down they’d lost their pub. So what the community management did was, they placed these big freezers out in the paddock and enclosed them in a barbed-wire fence to keep people out. That was now the pub, and at night everyone used to hang around this barbed-wire enclosure, drinking their quota of beer, with the big freezers on the inside of it; all run by electricity from a diesel generator out at the airstrip.

    Then, because they’d also lost the venue for their movies, they asked if they could use the school. The principal said yes and so that’s what they did. This was back in the old reel-to-reel days of film, and it was projected from the upper level of the school out onto a big screen, like at a drive-in picture show. Anyhow, us schoolteachers, we’d go upstairs to watch the movies. It’d be pelting down with rain and the locals would be sitting on the high concrete slab underneath, out of the downpour, and they’d bring their little chairs or they’d just sit on the concrete.

    Anyhow, they really liked the black actor, Sidney Poitier. He was their favourite. But the guy who ordered the films in, he got sick and tired of Sidney Poitier movies and so he decided to get in something a bit different. He ordered in Wuthering Heights.

    Now we used to teach the little Grade 1 and 2 kids the alphabet by using what was called the Van Leer Program. It was a program funded by the Dutch foundation, where you’d have these little puppets that would relate to a sound. Say if you had Abraham Ant, you’d show the kids Abraham Ant and they’d chant, ‘Abraham Ant says A.’ Then, for example, you’d have a puppet of, say, Percy Possum and the kids would chant, ‘Percy Possum says P.’ All that sort of stuff.

    As you may know, some Aborigines are very superstitious. Anyhow, we’re watching Wuthering Heights this night, and one of the teachers decides to stick Abraham Ant on a fishing line and, just as a scary part comes on, he lowered it down and dragged it across the crowd underneath. Of course all the parents, they don’t know what the hell it is. They think it’s some sort of spirit or something. So the old women start shrieking and screaming and carrying on, and all the old fellas, they’re in a panic. Then amid all this pandemonium the little kids hook into what’s going on. ‘Ey,’ they’re saying, ‘dere b’ Abraham Ant. ‘Dere b’ Abraham Ant. Abraham Ant says A. Abraham Ant says A.’

    Yes, so it was a very different place, that’s for sure.

    Back from the Dead

    I grew up in Blackwood, South Australia. When I was eighteen I left school and I started working on sheep stations in the north of the state. And from there, I just kept travelling north, into the Northern Territory, where I worked on a couple of cattle stations. This was in the mid-1980s and the last place I was at was Stirling Station, which is where the Aboriginal community of Wilora is. Wilora Community would’ve had over a hundred people and it had a school. It was a Reception to Year 12 school and there would’ve been somewhere between thirty and fifty students. It’s hard to tell the exact numbers.

    Stirling Station was two hundred and fifty kilometres north of Alice Springs and the homestead was five kilometres off the Stuart Highway. Ti Tree was the nearest pub and we were fifty kilometres north of Ti Tree. The people who owned Stirling used to employ three nineteen- or twenty-year-old Aboriginals full-time, then in the busy season we’d take on some casuals as well. That was for mustering and branding and building cattle yards and fencing and things like that.

    We used to get mail twice a week and, in the evenings, I’d sit down and help these Aboriginals with their mail. They could read and write to a degree, but some of their mail, like the forms they got from government departments, was quite detailed and they struggled to understand what they had to do and how to fill them out correctly. Anyhow, through them I got to know the two teachers at the community school and sometimes, like on a Friday afternoon or if I wasn’t busy on the station, I’d go and work with the older students, teaching basic carpentry and welding and things like that.

    And quite often it was mentioned, ‘You should become a teacher.’

    By then I’d been up in the Territory for nine years and I’d been on Stirling for two years, so I thought, Okay, perhaps it is time to make a change. So I came back to Adelaide and stayed with my parents while I went to college. After I graduated, I put in

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