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    Great Australian Outback School Stories
    Great Australian Outback School Stories
    Great Australian Outback School Stories
    Ebook359 pages5 hours

    Great Australian Outback School Stories

    By Bill Marsh

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    About this ebook

    Fabulous yarns and memories of going to school and teaching in the Outback.
    If your teacher commuted to school in a plane; if you had to watch out for rogue bulls rather than traffic; if your daily pick-up was done by a horse - you probably went to an outback school.this collection of more than sixty stories, gathered by Bill 'Swampy' Marsh in his travels across Australia, perfectly captures the experience of life growing up in the outback. Whether you loved school or not, these stories will bring a smile to your face and maybe even a tear to your eye, as students and teachers alike share their yarns and memories of a time gone by....this little kid, he spun around at me and he snapped, 'Piss off, Miss.'Of course, I immediately replied with, 'Excuse me. In this school we always use our best manners when we talk to teachers and adults. So what should we say, then?'And this little kid, well, he looked up at me all sheepish and he said, 'Well then, Miss, piss off, PLEASE.'
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers Australia
    Release dateSep 1, 2013
    ISBN9781743098622
    Great Australian Outback School 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 School Stories - Bill Marsh

      A Blessed Childhood

      Right, well I was born in Port Pirie, which is on Spencer Gulf in South Australia, and we lived in a kind of suburb of Port Pirie known as Solomontown. My father was an electrical engineer on the railways and my mum was a schoolteacher. Actually I was born on the day Darwin was bombed — February 19th 1942 — and the story goes that, upon his first sight of me, my dad went out and bought a hand pistol to protect us all from the fiendish Japanese invasion.

      Another event that may be of interest was that, at about that same time, an English passenger ship had been quarantined out in the bay of Port Pirie, due to an outbreak of yellow fever. The ship’s doctor just happened to be a young bloke called Gordon Stanley Ostlere and he said, ‘Well, while I’m stuck out here on the ship I may as well spend my spare time writing a book.’ So under the pseudonym of Richard Gordon he started writing and that was the beginning of the famous comic doctor series, with titles like Doctor in the House and Doctor at Sea which went from book form to radio, then on to film and television. They were very affectionate, charming and human stories, much like the veterinary books that James Herriot wrote.

      Port Pirie was at that time, and still is, a mining town so I began my adventures in life crawling around in the dirt of our backyard. In fact, my first meals most probably consisted of mercury and cadmium and all sorts of other strange metals. Then when I was a little older, Dad was shifted within the railways from Port Pirie to Port Augusta and that’s where I started my education.

      Now I don’t remember this but, family folklore has it that, when we first moved to Port Augusta, the railways people hadn’t yet organised our housing so we lived for a while in a cave under somebody’s house. That was on Hospital Road. And when we did shift into the railway house Mum did her removal bit by placing me in the pram, topping it up with pots and pans and curtains and so forth and walking her load around to our new place on the corner of Moyse Street and Spencer Terrace. That place is still there actually. It was a grand old house that I remember as having a passageway the exact same length of a cricket pitch — twenty-two yards — and there were curtains that you could pull across to separate the living areas from the bedrooms. To us, it was ‘posh-oh’. It even had stuff called ‘veltex’ on the floors and there were strange slatted things on the windows which had the exotic name of ‘Venetian blinds’.

      Then because my mum was a teacher, she started working at Port Augusta Primary School. I was one of her Grade 1 students and she made me sit in the front row, upright and cross-legged, perhaps to be a shining example of just how a good pupil should behave. So I sat there, legs aching, while Mum held up pictures of all sorts of weird and wonderful animals like a cat and we’d chant ‘C—A—T’. But for some reason I mustn’t have proven to be the model student my mother had hoped I’d be because before long I was shifted to Mrs Brown’s class.

      Oh, and that’s right, I remember there was a huge pepper tree in the schoolyard. The pepper tree was perfect for us kids; when you crushed its leaves they gave forth a full-blown aroma that could disguise the most incriminating of smells. It was also wonderful for climbing and, more importantly, you could take the little berries off the tree and fire them through a drinking straw. ‘Wham’, as straight as a die, they went for miles. Straws were readily available because back then they delivered milk in tiny bottles and the milk had a fair-dinkum layer of yellow cream on the top. The only trouble was, by the time we got to taste the milk — especially in the summer months — it was more often than not on the turn and the cream was a bit off. But we still drank it because the teachers said it was good for us and, in those days, you didn’t argue with the teachers. And, of course, the milk was free and the bottles themselves had little silver caps that, when you flicked them, they’d spin through the air like little mini space ships. Of course, later generations pinched the idea from us Port Augusta kids and they called it a Frisbee, and they made a fortune.

      Though, no doubt the highlight of Grade 1 was the day of the Great Night Cart Disaster. The night cart was a huge cart on wheels. It carried lots of drums and it was drawn along by a team of docile draughthorses. For those who aren’t familiar: back in those days the toilets were down the bottom of the backyard, backing onto a small lane. The dunnies we used were a can and, because toilet paper hadn’t yet arrived in Port Augusta, we’d wipe ourselves with newspaper. So we’d do our business in the can and then once a week the night cart would arrive to take the can away.

      Accompanying the night cart would be a couple of ragged men, draped in hessian bags. They’d open a flap at the back of the toilet and remove the odoriferous can, which was, by now, swarmed by flies and inundated by redback spiders. These men would then lift the can up onto their shoulder and run up a plank and dump the doings into the drum-collection of accumulated poo and wee. And these men were strong, and they were agile. They had to be; as a child I imagined them to be a slightly desperate and mad lot who’d be found after working hours in a hotel down near the wharf, trying to numb themselves from the reality of their occupation.

      But to forget their occupation would’ve been impossible on that fateful day — the day of the Great Night Cart Disaster — because that morning as we Protestant children gathered at Port Augusta Primary School, we looked up and saw the night cart edging its way down the hill, seemingly to be under the complete control of the docile draughthorses. Then something went awry. Something upset the long-suffering horses and they panicked, and took off, heading in our direction, and as they got to the bottom of the hill they must’ve thought better of galloping headlong into our Port Augusta Primary School so they did a sharp left and the cart, not understanding Newton’s laws of motion, kept heading toward us under its own inertia. Then, right at the critical moment, the cart flipped over and, in doing so, the cans and their contents were flung in all directions. And us kids stood agape as we witnessed half of Port Augusta’s collected doings splatter out across the road before us. It was wonderful. It was a catastrophic calamity, and all us Protestant kids, we were screaming and we were cheering and we were laughing as the men, adorned in their hessian garb, struggled, sloshed and slipped amid the muck, mayhem and now-empty drums, trying to restrain the horses. It was absolute toilet Armageddon. The most perfect start to a school day, ever.

      Those were the days, just after the Second World War, when refugees from far-off places like Poland and Italy came to settle in the likes of Port Augusta and Whyalla. And many of them were Catholic. I clearly remember the first Italian I saw. It was a woman. She was out on the front beach of Port Augusta, and she had a bikini on. It was outrageous. Scandalous. Port Augusta was in a state of catalepsy at such a sight. So was I, but in a different way. To me she was the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen; her brownish skin, her dark mysterious eyes, the cigarette that hung from her plump lips, and whatever was hidden beneath that skimpy bikini caused my imagination to flip into its first hormonal cartwheel.

      I believe that the arrival of the refugees also had an effect upon my mother. In many ways she was my inspiration. Our mother collected the family history: a passing parade of preachers and drunkards and insane people like artists and writers and layabouts. After Dad had passed, the dear, dear lady continued as a teacher until she was seventy, not only at Port Augusta but at various other country schools. She also wrote. Mum loved writing, and I’ve still got a collection of her poems, penned in the stye of Milton; wonderful odes that were part of her secret and imaginative life.

      She never read any of these to me and I didn’t even see them until much later, shortly before she died. It was around the same time that I caught her attempting to burn a stack of old family letters that were full of scandals and treacherous incriminations and all those things every family has. So perhaps with the realisation of her own fate, she’d decided to ditch the evidence. Oh my gosh, I would’ve been in my mid-forties by then, and that’s when she gave me a few of her other precious treasures plus some of her poetry. Then long after she’d passed, I just happened to open one of her books of poetry and out fell an old black-and-white photograph; it was of a gorgeous Italian man and I thought, Perhaps, just perhaps, there might’ve been a wonderful romance there.

      During my primary school years in Port Augusta many things were changing. It was the time when world-famous actors started coming to South Australia to make films up in the wilds of the Flinders Ranges; stars like the beautiful Maureen O’Hara, and the dimple-chinned Robert Mitchum, and a tall lanky bloke called Chips Rafferty who kept forgetting his lines.

      They were also the days when it was such a thrill to be given the job of Ink Monitor, which allowed you the privilege of mixing the black powder in with some water, then taking it to the double wooden, iron-framed desks and filling the tiny white ceramic ink wells. It was a huge honour to be Ink Monitor. Huge.

      And it was also a time where you’d sit beside your best friend, the friend you’d sat beside right from when you’d both started writing on slates. In Grade 1 and 2 we had slates and you’d wipe off your writing with rags, which were sodden and stinking of old spit. Then after you could form letters such as C—A—T you graduated to a lead pencil and you’d scrub out your mistakes with what was called a ‘rubber’ which, most probably due to the influx of Catholics, was later named an ‘eraser’. Then once you’d mastered the vagaries of the pencil you graduated to an ink pen, with its nib so fragile that if you pressed down too hard, the nib points would cross and flick ink everywhere. And we had thick blotting paper to absorb the blotches and splotches.

      My best friend’s dad was a bank manager, and one day we saw a stack of blotting paper in his house so, being the enterprising sorts we were, we took it to school and started selling it. We were well on our way to making our first fortune until someone discovered that when you reused the blotting paper or scraped pencil over it, there, in mirror image, was the indented private financial statistical lives of most of the residents of Port Augusta. It was an absolute catastrophe. Almost on the scale of the day of the Great Night Cart Disaster, except this time we were at the epicentre of the mayhem. But we survived.

      In a sense I had a blessed childhood — a childhood with this amazing space all around me — of being able to look up into an enormous sky that stretched forever; of the unpredictable Spencer Gulf to one side and the rugged Flinders Ranges to the other; and I’d lie in bed at night and I’d listen to the sounds of the trains leaving Port Augusta and heading west, and those trains would take my imagination by the hand and they’d lead me out across a vast continent where I’d discover the most wonderful places and experience cultures that were filled to overflowing with the most exciting, tantalising and exotic people. Little did I know of course that, in those days, the first major train stop was at a little, dusty, wind-blown, one-horse town called Kimba.

      A Good News Story

      My husband and I live on a station property next to the Shark Bay World Heritage Site of Western Australia. We have four children: one girl and three boys. For their primary education, apart from a short spell, I taught them all through School of the Air. Following that they completed three years of boarding at Geraldton before we sent them to Perth for their last three years. We did that just to give them a bit more ‘life’ exposure. And it’s worked out well because, since then, they’ve all gone on to lead successful lives. The eldest is now a midwife. The second eldest is an Agricultural Science/Commerce graduate from the University of Western Australia. He spent two years in Port Lincoln, South Australia, as a grain merchant for a co-operative of farmers who have a joint venture with a larger grain company. He’s now based in Geraldton.

      Our third child, he’s now twenty-three and he’s an electrician supervisor for a large German-run mining company who build big reclaimers and stackers. If they show any mining footage on the television you’ll usually see those big machines with a bucket-wheel that stretches out and scoops up the ore. That’s a reclaimer and then the stacker stacks the ore. Well he does the wiring on them. He’s a fly in–fly out worker and he’s been doing four weeks on and one week off ever since he left school. Of course, apart from his natural ability, one of the other reasons the company was so keen for him to have the job was that they were of the mind that, if you came from a farming background and you went to a boarding school, you’d be able to handle just about any sort of work and conditions they required.

      Our youngest son is an electrician as well. His name is Stuart and he’s also a fly in–fly out worker. He’s currently working on a mine near the Capricorn Roadhouse. While our second son’s job is in the construction area, Stuart’s is more in the maintenance area. He could be doing anything from replacing the electric motors that drive the conveyor belts to just simply changing a light globe, or he might be rewiring the internet connections or replacing and rewiring a fuse box that’s burnt out.

      Stuart’s is an interesting story. He’s dyslexic, and if he’d been taught in a conventional school I feel that he might well have fallen through the cracks. Reading and writing don’t come easily to him. But because School of the Air was sympathetic to his needs and I was able to teach him for his first seven years, he did learn to manage his schoolwork, even though it was a laborious task. One way we managed was that after he’d written his original draft of schoolwork, I’d then do a proofread copy of it and we’d send both copies in to School of the Air for marking. And that worked well. Then after he completed his primary schooling he went to Geraldton where he boarded for the first three years of high school and, I must say, he had such fantastic support there. He had two support lessons a week and if he did an important exam he had a scribe with him. A scribe was a volunteer who sat with Stuart and wrote down what he dictated.

      But after those three years in Geraldton it was then a real case of, well, what do we do now? The other boys had done their final two years at a fabulous school in Perth — Aquinas College — and so should we send him there, like we did with the others, or should he stay in Geraldton where he had such great support? Anyway I got in touch with Aquinas and when I explained the situation they said, ‘Look we’ll make an appointment for you to come and talk to some people.’

      I was quite apprehensive about it all because I had the feeling that Aquinas didn’t really want kids like Stuart. They were after kids who were more academically inclined, while in Geraldton the teachers were saying, ‘What do you want him to go there for? We want him to stay here.’ They even intimated that if he stayed on in Geraldton he had the qualities to become a school prefect. So it was a very difficult decision to make. Very difficult. But I knew how much our other boys had enjoyed Aquinas and, in particular, how beneficial it was for them to have had the experience of being a little fish in a big pond rather than, at Geraldton, being a big fish in a little pond. And they needed that sort of a challenge. It broadened their horizons.

      Well I turned up at Aquinas and there I was sitting around a table with the deputy principal and the dean of students and somebody else, and it was me who virtually interviewed them. I said, ‘Well, what can you do for my son?’

      After our chat my husband and I, along with Stuart, decided that he should attend Aquinas, despite there being virtually no support for his learning difficulty. So, what I started doing was exactly what we’d done with School of the Air, where he wrote his original copy of schoolwork then I did an edited copy. So he’d email his work and I’d save the original copy. I’d then edit what he’d done and when he submitted his work at school, he’d submit both his original copy and the edited copy. And believe me, his original copy was quite a challenge. But the teachers were happy with that and nobody complained.

      So that’s what we did for most subjects and then at the end of Year 12 he won the Curriculum Council Award for Metalwork in Western Australia. That’s the top prize for metalwork in the state, and it was fantastic. Yes, so I think our sending Stuart away to Perth was probably the hardest decision we’ve ever had to make, especially taking into consideration how his dyslexia could well have affected his high school education, and thankfully it turned out to be the right decision.

      My feeling is that, even though he was given less support, it was Stuart’s strength of character that made him rise to another level. In doing so he was better prepared for life after school. It was a good news story. A very good news story, and more was to follow because when he went off to do his apprenticeship he was judged ‘Rookie of the Year’ for his company. That was fantastic too, and it just goes to show how, in many cases, the kids who struggle at school do so because the system’s not geared to their particular needs.

      A Smile on their Face

      This story goes back to the early 1990s when I was doing a bit of part-time teaching at a small community school just outside of Bellingen, on the New South Wales north coast. It was a pretty free and easy sort of existence which suited my ‘hippie’ lifestyle. At that stage I was living with some people and so, when we decided to pitch in and buy a property together, I needed to get a decent-paying job.

      I also think, at that time in my life, I was really wanting to get to know some Aboriginal people and to get a closer understanding of their culture. Then one day I saw an advertisement for a teaching job, at a predominantly Aboriginal Catholic school, in the far north of Western Australia. So I applied for the position and I was then interviewed over the phone by the nun who was the school’s principal. I got the feeling that they must’ve been quite desperate because when I asked what her expectations would be, as far as I can now recall, she said that my main objective would be to teach the children how to write their names and how to say their prayers. That didn’t seem to be too much of a problem, or so I thought at the time.

      ‘Anything else?’ I asked, and I was told that, as a female member of her staff, I’d be expected to live a good clean kind of Christian Catholic life. I wasn’t Catholic, but I didn’t drink, so I said, ‘Yes, I’ll certainly be able to do that.’ Mind you, that proved to be quite ironical too because, as it turned out, there were a few of the Catholic teachers who’d be out half the night drinking and carrying on. Enough said.

      Anyhow I got the job and I went up there in the April and even though it was after the wet season, I’d never known such heat. Yes, it got warm in Bellingen but this was like a slow motion sort of heat. It was draining. To start with I had to share a house with a woman who worked in the mining industry. With me being a hippie, that was philosophically difficult as I was very much against the, you know, raping of the earth and all of that. But the clash of ideologies didn’t come to much because for the first couple of months I’d come home from school, dead tired, and I’d fall asleep, partly due to the heat and partly from the exhaustion of teaching.

      And the teaching was exhausting. Much tougher than I’d thought. At the school there would’ve been six or seven different classes, from Kindergarten upwards, with a staff of maybe ten, plus there were the Aboriginal teachers’ aides. I had about twenty kids on my roll, though I’d be lucky if half of them turned up on any one given day. Most of the kids lived on the reserve just outside of town; then there were those from outer communities who would occasionally visit town with their families. So they’d come and go.

      Initially there were a few cultural things I struggled with, like how there was a volatility about the kids. It wasn’t only until later did I realise that there was a lot of subtle things going on. Just a wrong look and a fight would break out, or perhaps there was some sort of a family feud going on outside of school, or even difficulties at home with domestic problems and all that. And also, with me having come from a pretty free and easy community school, I now found myself in a restrictive Catholic school environment.

      But being the creative person I am, I adapted to the situation the best I could and after a while I was given more freedom. And that’s when I began to tune in more closely as to what the kids enjoyed doing. Like I didn’t really have to follow any kind of curriculum or anything, so we did a lot of art. We started a garden. We grew pawpaws, we grew veggies and, because eating appealed to the kids, I decided to do cooking lessons.

      With the cooking lessons and with me being a vegetarian, I avoided cooking meat. So I’d write the recipes up on the blackboard and the kids would copy them down in their books. We’d then work out what ingredients we needed and estimate how much they’d cost. We’d pool our money. I’d put some in and the kids added in whatever they could, then we’d go down to the supermarket to get whatever we required. When they got to the till they’d have to work out how much they had to pay for their items and how much change they’d get. After that we’d come back to the school where we’d write up our real costs. Then we’d go to the cooking room where they’d have to sort out who was going to do what job in the kitchen, and we’d start preparing the meal. When the meal had been cooked, before we ate, we’d all sit around a big table and give our thanks to everyone who’d been involved in producing the food. Then we’d get stuck in.

      The whole process was a fun way of learning maths and the English language. By saying ‘the English language’, I mean they generally spoke in Kriol, which is a kind of Aboriginal English. Anyhow, the cooking project was a very communal thing to do and it was also culturally significant and appropriate.

      Another technique I used was for the children to learn through playing games. I had noticed how their parents would sit around the park and play cards during the day. I thought, Okay, I’ll make up cards relating to maths and literacy topics, where the kids had to match pictures to sounds or to words. I then got the kids to sit in circles and we’d play the card games, just like their parents did — and they’d be learning.

      Also, when I first went up there I found that, if the Aboriginal children wrote something wrong on a piece of paper, they’d get very upset and angry about it. They’d break the pencil and they’d screw up the piece of paper and throw it in the bin and run out of the classroom. That was because they felt like a failure. It was useless giving them rubbers — erasers. They disappeared in a flash, never to be seen again. Okay, I thought, so then what’s the best way around this? So I got one of those huge wooden reel things — you know the ones they roll telephone cable and the like up in — and I slapped blackboard paint on that and they’d sit around this table and write things down with chalk. If they made a mistake, it didn’t matter. They just rubbed it out with an old piece of rag. And they didn’t get upset and angry any more. They didn’t feel like a failure, which, mind you, is a really big thing with the Aboriginal people. It’s a shame-based culture. That’s why they don’t take risks, and so you have to remove that element of failure for them to be able to succeed.

      Then with me being a yoga teacher, we also did some yoga. As well as that I’d go out and record local Aboriginal stories. We’d sit and listen to those and write them down. After they were written down I’d then play some relevant music and ask one of the children to narrate the story in English — rather than Kriol. What I was doing may not have been totally culturally appropriate but, by using their own stories, I found that they would relate to them more easily. In doing so, they were more prepared to join in and, when that happened, I’d encourage them to dance the story, as they saw fit.

      I not only wanted them to be able to write their own names and be able to say their prayers. I wanted them to go beyond that and start to enjoy the actual learning process. I really wanted them to feel that school was an okay place to come to; a place that could be fun and that had some sort of significance and relevance to their lives. To that end, we’d go on lots of excursions and they’d write up the experience in their story books. They’d do a drawing and they’d read their story out. We might have lit a fire and done some cooking, or I’d taken them down to the dam for a swim after school.

      For a more cultural-based experience I would organise camps and I’d take the kids and their grandparents out to one of their outstations for a few days. The old ladies once caught a turtle and they cooked it and we ate it. We’d go for walks and, as we walked through the country, the old women would say things like, ‘I was born over there, under that tree,’ or they’d recall their days of running away from the police when they’d come to round them up and take them away. Back when all that ‘stolen generation’ business was happening, the church had provided a safe haven for these people, and they remained grateful for that. That’s why they were so keen for their grandchildren to attend the church school.

      Yes, things got tough at times but, in the main, they were beautiful kids. And we were getting somewhere; somewhere far greater than them just being able to write their names and say their prayers. That said, at the same time I was also starting to have difficulties with the school. Things like the principal wanting the children to come along in a clean uniform every day. I really thought the emphasis on that was wrong. Totally. I mean, it was a huge battle for them to even buy a uniform let alone wear a clean one every day.

      There were also other things, like how their grandparents always carried a stick to fight off any stray dogs or to fight off the drunks or whatever. So, of course, the kids would come to school with sticks. And that wasn’t allowed, and you weren’t allowed to climb trees. You weren’t allowed to do this, you weren’t allowed to do that, and I just could not reconcile all that Aboriginal cultural stuff within the restrictive Catholic school system.

      An example was: they were putting the kids away in

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