Learning the hard way
The first day of the new school term dawns black and blue above the baked red ground. Inside the open door to her classroom, the new teacher writes a few sentences of introduction on the whiteboard and asks her eight pupils to introduce themselves on the first page of their fresh textbooks. Sitting in the front row, Byron* obediently picks up his pencil.
‘Hello,’ he writes. ‘My name is Miss Elle. I am 27 years old. I come from a big family. I have two sisters and no brothers. I have a mum and a dad and lots of aunts, uncles and cousins.’ Byron is 14. He is an Australian Aboriginal from Wanarn in Western Australia, a tattered 100-strong community situated deep within his country’s red centre, about 400 kilometres west along the bouncing
dirt-track Great Central Road from Uluru. He has three brothers and no sisters and, after ten years of school, has learned to slavishly copy out whatever his teacher puts up
on the board.
Sadly, Byron isn’t unique. He isn’t even the exception in his school. Faced with the prospect of an entire generation just like him, many in Australia – including their own parents – are calling for these children to be sent away from home, to boarding schools, to learn.
Echoes of the past
I first meet Byron on a rabbit-hunting trip. There’s nothing romantic about it: rabbits are feral invaders in this fragile desert and the boys chase their prey in a Toyota Land Cruiser before beating them to death with hockey sticks. Running barefoot through the sharp spinifex grass, Byron is the last to make a kill, crash-tackling his victim on the ground. He proudly carries the struggling rabbit back to the Toyota, where its neck is broken.
Back at camp, he asks me to show him how to write his name with joined-up letters and delights in covering pages of my notepad with his discovery, repeated over and over. We struggle with his surname – Morris – as he can’t spell it.
Effectively illiterate, Byron’s future hangs in the balance. Over the state border from Wanarn, in the Northern Territory, the Australian government is building three new ‘boarding facilities’ to take Aboriginal children out of their communities for the length of the school term. Four more ‘hostels’ for Aboriginal teenagers studying apprenticeships will be strung across the desert towns to the north.
The choice of words is careful. Critics, including Byron’s teacher, say it’s a revolution in reverse; they point to the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal children who suffered a century of enforced removal from their families by governments and missionaries up until the 1970s. Dislocated from their homes and their culture, these children grew up in white-run boarding schools. Many are the parents and grandparents of children at school today.
In the second week of term, Byron’s teachers host a barbecue on the school lawn, the only public patch of green in town. The principal appeals to the assembled parents to make their children come to school more often. If they don’t, he may be forced to close the high-school class. Without it, the children will either have to leave Wanarn to go to school or drop out.
Byron himself is happily unaware of the forces that may decide his place in the world. As far as he knows, he has found it. A few kilometres outside Wanarn, he points to a broken pillar of white quartz, unique among the sun-bleached scrub and sand. Irrepressible when speaking his native Ngaanyatjarra, Byron softly stumbles over English, telling the story of the land. ‘This is cockatoo, kakalyalya. That one black one,’ he says, pointing at the neighbouring hill. ‘Crow. They fight. Fire, waru. Them sit down, business. Go on.’
The 'Aboriginal problem'
Wanarn’s teachers emerge wearily and lock their homes behind them – one has already woken to find her door handle torn off in an attempted break-in. Next come the kids: beautiful, affectionate, apparently carefree, but thin. Some are half-deaf from chronic ear infections. Others have fathers in prison. Others still are ‘dumbed down’ by solvent abuse. After the school bell wails at 8.30am, the principal drives around town, knocking on doors to shepherd in the stragglers.
After the kids have gone, their parents gather around the petrol bowser, sit and wait for the town’s one store to open. Unemployment here is almost total. Halfway through the school term, the local MP arrives, camera crew in tow, but doesn’t seem interested in talking to the crowd.
When press and politicians want to be seen to be addressing the ‘Aboriginal problem’, they typically look to Aurukun, Queensland, a township of about 1,200 on Cape York Peninsula with a reputation
for booze-fuelled domestic violence, once the highest in Australia. The minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, visited Aurukun in March last year and held a private meeting with the community’s women.
‘They want the kids out of violent, overcrowded houses where they can’t sleep at night,’ Macklin said, ‘away from the alcohol and drug-fuelled violence where they are at risk of abuse. Away from the torrents of porn, which, like grog [alcohol], is poisoning and destroying these communities.’ A day later, she announced a new ‘student hostel’ at Weipa, about 100 kilometres north.
Martha Koowarta, whose shell of a home houses up to ten people, was one of the women who met the minister. Now a grandmother, she herself was put in a missionary-run dormitory school at the age of nine.
‘We weren’t stolen. It was a better system,’ she says. ‘The children need to be taken away, to go to school. To learn English, then come back. It’s not safe for them here.’
Absent without leave
The teachers, however, say that it’s neither neglect nor child abuse that is the problem – although both exist – but attendance. Solve that, and there’s no need to send children away. Aboriginal kids often enjoy a cultural freedom to make their own mistakes and learn from them, a tradition that extends to having some remit over whether or not they go to school. Many don’t.
During the winter, when the heat subsides, entire families will crowd into beaten-up old cars for the ride to whichever distant community is hosting that weekend’s Australian rules football carnival. The round trip can last a week, during which the children simply disappear from school. Funerals, too, require a family to travel enormous distances.
Weipa’s new hostel will replace an existing facility that currently houses 20 Aboriginal high-school students, some of whom are from communities so remote that they arrive on charter flights, returning home only in the holidays. With beds for 100 more, it’s expected to be the first of a series of hostels built on the peninsula over the coming decade, which will eventually house about ten times that number. In the mantra of those behind the project, these hostels will both solve attendance and ‘give the kids three meals a day and let them concentrate on their work’.
Based in regional towns, the hostels will also make life easier for their mostly white teachers. In Wanarn, Byron has seen five teachers come and go in as many months. The most recent arrived to find a classroom piled high with students’ work from six years before. Magazines had been left to fester since 1981.
‘Parents are lining up three deep to get their kids in here [Weipa],’ one refreshingly blunt education department official tells me. ‘That’s why this Stolen Generations argument is balls.’ A system of government grants helps the parents of another 400 Aboriginal children across Cape
York send their kids to private boarding schools.
‘It’s going to take half a generation to turn this around,’ the official says. ‘We’re talking really big numbers and a really big logistical problem. But we’re up for it.’
Two futures
Byron is riding happily in another white Land Cruiser, a football tucked under one arm like a teddy bear. He’s being taken on a school trip to a long-dry lakebed, where his people have mined ochre for generations, but first his parents must sign a consent slip to allow school staff to make medical decisions in the event of an accident in the remote bush.
Byron directs the driver to the town’s low-rise breezeblock office, where his brothers and father are queuing for their weekly welfare payments. The signature obtained, the vehicle bounces out of town. Behind it, this ‘sit-down money’ is gambled away almost immediately in card games played on blankets in the street. It’s exciting: pots can be thousands of dollars; lose, and you have no money for food.
This is one future for Byron. To see another, you have to head north, right up to the Tiwi Islands, where, 90 kilometres across the Arafura Sea, the revolution has arrived. Built by the local Aboriginal community, with funding from the Australian government, Tiwi College is run under contract by the Northern Territory Christian Schools Association (NTCSA). Its students arrive each Monday by boat, staying for the week before returning to their families on the mainland.
Each school day starts with ‘devotions’: readings from the Bible or some other Christian text. Outside the classroom, the house parents, Bill and Linda Chambers, look after the boys. Like the Roman Catholics of a previous generation, Bill is a missionary, an evangelical Christian from Tennessee. ‘What I like to tell the children is the Bible is God’s owner’s manual for us,’ Bill says.
Tiwi College is the third school opened by the NTCSA, each at the direct request of a local Aboriginal community. Two more are expected to follow next year. Its staff say that in its first six months, the reading age of pupils has increased by, on average, two and a half years. Attendance remains disappointing, but when they do show up, the children have laptops in their class-room – a far cry from the situation in Wanarn.
Colour lessons
Back in the ochre mine, two elderly Aboriginal women sit surrounded by children, grinding the white, purple, pink and yellow stone into powder. Wearing striped woollen hats against the winter chill, they rub their fingers in the dust, demonstrating on their bodies how each colour is used: white for dancing, yellow for funerals, purple for religious ceremonies.
Byron sits at the back, looking bored at first, but comes alive when the chance comes to thrust his own hand into the piles of colour and paint the faces of his friends. Returning home, he sings happily in Ngaanyatjarra. Partly, he is happy that only a few days more remain of term. It’s also obvious that the day’s lessons are as important to him – if not more so – as anything learned inside the schoolroom.
That evening, while I’m eating dinner with his teacher, Byron knocks on the door. Still wearing white ochre stripes across his cheeks, he rests one hand on her shoulder and softly says: ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to school.’
*Some names have been changed
September 2009
‘Hello,’ he writes. ‘My name is Miss Elle. I am 27 years old. I come from a big family. I have two sisters and no brothers. I have a mum and a dad and lots of aunts, uncles and cousins.’ Byron is 14. He is an Australian Aboriginal from Wanarn in Western Australia, a tattered 100-strong community situated deep within his country’s red centre, about 400 kilometres west along the bouncing
dirt-track Great Central Road from Uluru. He has three brothers and no sisters and, after ten years of school, has learned to slavishly copy out whatever his teacher puts up
on the board.
Sadly, Byron isn’t unique. He isn’t even the exception in his school. Faced with the prospect of an entire generation just like him, many in Australia – including their own parents – are calling for these children to be sent away from home, to boarding schools, to learn.
Echoes of the past
I first meet Byron on a rabbit-hunting trip. There’s nothing romantic about it: rabbits are feral invaders in this fragile desert and the boys chase their prey in a Toyota Land Cruiser before beating them to death with hockey sticks. Running barefoot through the sharp spinifex grass, Byron is the last to make a kill, crash-tackling his victim on the ground. He proudly carries the struggling rabbit back to the Toyota, where its neck is broken.
Back at camp, he asks me to show him how to write his name with joined-up letters and delights in covering pages of my notepad with his discovery, repeated over and over. We struggle with his surname – Morris – as he can’t spell it.
Effectively illiterate, Byron’s future hangs in the balance. Over the state border from Wanarn, in the Northern Territory, the Australian government is building three new ‘boarding facilities’ to take Aboriginal children out of their communities for the length of the school term. Four more ‘hostels’ for Aboriginal teenagers studying apprenticeships will be strung across the desert towns to the north.
The choice of words is careful. Critics, including Byron’s teacher, say it’s a revolution in reverse; they point to the Stolen Generations, Aboriginal children who suffered a century of enforced removal from their families by governments and missionaries up until the 1970s. Dislocated from their homes and their culture, these children grew up in white-run boarding schools. Many are the parents and grandparents of children at school today.
In the second week of term, Byron’s teachers host a barbecue on the school lawn, the only public patch of green in town. The principal appeals to the assembled parents to make their children come to school more often. If they don’t, he may be forced to close the high-school class. Without it, the children will either have to leave Wanarn to go to school or drop out.
Byron himself is happily unaware of the forces that may decide his place in the world. As far as he knows, he has found it. A few kilometres outside Wanarn, he points to a broken pillar of white quartz, unique among the sun-bleached scrub and sand. Irrepressible when speaking his native Ngaanyatjarra, Byron softly stumbles over English, telling the story of the land. ‘This is cockatoo, kakalyalya. That one black one,’ he says, pointing at the neighbouring hill. ‘Crow. They fight. Fire, waru. Them sit down, business. Go on.’
The 'Aboriginal problem'
Wanarn’s teachers emerge wearily and lock their homes behind them – one has already woken to find her door handle torn off in an attempted break-in. Next come the kids: beautiful, affectionate, apparently carefree, but thin. Some are half-deaf from chronic ear infections. Others have fathers in prison. Others still are ‘dumbed down’ by solvent abuse. After the school bell wails at 8.30am, the principal drives around town, knocking on doors to shepherd in the stragglers.
After the kids have gone, their parents gather around the petrol bowser, sit and wait for the town’s one store to open. Unemployment here is almost total. Halfway through the school term, the local MP arrives, camera crew in tow, but doesn’t seem interested in talking to the crowd.
When press and politicians want to be seen to be addressing the ‘Aboriginal problem’, they typically look to Aurukun, Queensland, a township of about 1,200 on Cape York Peninsula with a reputation
for booze-fuelled domestic violence, once the highest in Australia. The minister for indigenous affairs, Jenny Macklin, visited Aurukun in March last year and held a private meeting with the community’s women.
‘They want the kids out of violent, overcrowded houses where they can’t sleep at night,’ Macklin said, ‘away from the alcohol and drug-fuelled violence where they are at risk of abuse. Away from the torrents of porn, which, like grog [alcohol], is poisoning and destroying these communities.’ A day later, she announced a new ‘student hostel’ at Weipa, about 100 kilometres north.
Martha Koowarta, whose shell of a home houses up to ten people, was one of the women who met the minister. Now a grandmother, she herself was put in a missionary-run dormitory school at the age of nine.
‘We weren’t stolen. It was a better system,’ she says. ‘The children need to be taken away, to go to school. To learn English, then come back. It’s not safe for them here.’
Absent without leave
The teachers, however, say that it’s neither neglect nor child abuse that is the problem – although both exist – but attendance. Solve that, and there’s no need to send children away. Aboriginal kids often enjoy a cultural freedom to make their own mistakes and learn from them, a tradition that extends to having some remit over whether or not they go to school. Many don’t.
During the winter, when the heat subsides, entire families will crowd into beaten-up old cars for the ride to whichever distant community is hosting that weekend’s Australian rules football carnival. The round trip can last a week, during which the children simply disappear from school. Funerals, too, require a family to travel enormous distances.
Weipa’s new hostel will replace an existing facility that currently houses 20 Aboriginal high-school students, some of whom are from communities so remote that they arrive on charter flights, returning home only in the holidays. With beds for 100 more, it’s expected to be the first of a series of hostels built on the peninsula over the coming decade, which will eventually house about ten times that number. In the mantra of those behind the project, these hostels will both solve attendance and ‘give the kids three meals a day and let them concentrate on their work’.
Based in regional towns, the hostels will also make life easier for their mostly white teachers. In Wanarn, Byron has seen five teachers come and go in as many months. The most recent arrived to find a classroom piled high with students’ work from six years before. Magazines had been left to fester since 1981.
‘Parents are lining up three deep to get their kids in here [Weipa],’ one refreshingly blunt education department official tells me. ‘That’s why this Stolen Generations argument is balls.’ A system of government grants helps the parents of another 400 Aboriginal children across Cape
York send their kids to private boarding schools.
‘It’s going to take half a generation to turn this around,’ the official says. ‘We’re talking really big numbers and a really big logistical problem. But we’re up for it.’
Two futures
Byron is riding happily in another white Land Cruiser, a football tucked under one arm like a teddy bear. He’s being taken on a school trip to a long-dry lakebed, where his people have mined ochre for generations, but first his parents must sign a consent slip to allow school staff to make medical decisions in the event of an accident in the remote bush.
Byron directs the driver to the town’s low-rise breezeblock office, where his brothers and father are queuing for their weekly welfare payments. The signature obtained, the vehicle bounces out of town. Behind it, this ‘sit-down money’ is gambled away almost immediately in card games played on blankets in the street. It’s exciting: pots can be thousands of dollars; lose, and you have no money for food.
This is one future for Byron. To see another, you have to head north, right up to the Tiwi Islands, where, 90 kilometres across the Arafura Sea, the revolution has arrived. Built by the local Aboriginal community, with funding from the Australian government, Tiwi College is run under contract by the Northern Territory Christian Schools Association (NTCSA). Its students arrive each Monday by boat, staying for the week before returning to their families on the mainland.
Each school day starts with ‘devotions’: readings from the Bible or some other Christian text. Outside the classroom, the house parents, Bill and Linda Chambers, look after the boys. Like the Roman Catholics of a previous generation, Bill is a missionary, an evangelical Christian from Tennessee. ‘What I like to tell the children is the Bible is God’s owner’s manual for us,’ Bill says.
Tiwi College is the third school opened by the NTCSA, each at the direct request of a local Aboriginal community. Two more are expected to follow next year. Its staff say that in its first six months, the reading age of pupils has increased by, on average, two and a half years. Attendance remains disappointing, but when they do show up, the children have laptops in their class-room – a far cry from the situation in Wanarn.
Colour lessons
Back in the ochre mine, two elderly Aboriginal women sit surrounded by children, grinding the white, purple, pink and yellow stone into powder. Wearing striped woollen hats against the winter chill, they rub their fingers in the dust, demonstrating on their bodies how each colour is used: white for dancing, yellow for funerals, purple for religious ceremonies.
Byron sits at the back, looking bored at first, but comes alive when the chance comes to thrust his own hand into the piles of colour and paint the faces of his friends. Returning home, he sings happily in Ngaanyatjarra. Partly, he is happy that only a few days more remain of term. It’s also obvious that the day’s lessons are as important to him – if not more so – as anything learned inside the schoolroom.
That evening, while I’m eating dinner with his teacher, Byron knocks on the door. Still wearing white ochre stripes across his cheeks, he rests one hand on her shoulder and softly says: ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to school.’
*Some names have been changed
September 2009
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