I was a classroom teacher for 15 years in a rural town in the Atherton Tablelands, just inland from Cairns in North Queensland. I quit teaching for a while and went to work as a photo journalist until an opportunity came along for me to visit a property where we had friends. They couldn't keep a governess to look after their children during school time because they were so remote and no-one wanted to stay there. I went out with my wife and my child, who was eight at the time, and listened to the teachers at the Cairns School of the Air teaching these kids. I thought: 'I can do that, I want to do that'. So I applied to come back into teaching with the School of the Air and they sent me to Mount Isa. That was 18 years ago – and I'm still here.
Mount Isa School of the Air looks after approximately 200 children scattered across a massive area – our coverage area is about the size of France. It's about 800,000 square kilometres, though that changes a little bit each year as we get children from more distant properties or we lose them as they progress onto secondary schools or boarding school. If we have to go and see those children there's a lot of travel involved, a lot of driving and flying. But we try as much as possible to get out and actually see their properties and meet them at home and see what their situations are.
The School of the Air (SOTA) is an opportunity for children who are spread over a massive area to access an education that they otherwise wouldn't have. They are too far away to attend any traditional schools, so we teach them by correspondence and by telephone.
These kids mainly live on very isolated cattle stations in our area, though we do have a few sheep stations as well. It would take them days in some circumstances to drive to the nearest school, so we provide that alternative for them. A lot of the time, too, the weather conditions prevent them from travelling, because in the wet season up here a lot of properties are cut off for weeks and weeks on end.
Ever since 1960 when we first started the SOTA here in Clonclurry, North Queensland, we have worked in the same way the 'flying doctor' works, using the same high frequency radio frequencies. Then two or three years ago technology caught up with us. We now use the more modern teleconferencing using satellite telephone set-ups. That has its advantages in that we don't suffer as much from storm activity interrupting the radio frequencies and sunspot activity, which used to knock our radios out frequently.
So the children are all connected to the school by telephone and they each have their own PIN number to call into the school using their microwave-linked phones and access their lessons every day. That's why we still call ourselves School of the Air, because we're really still dependant on airwaves for our communication. Some people say, 'you should change your name now because you're not really using radio', but we are, in a way, because microwave-linked phones still use the airwaves.
It's a two-way process. I have 16 Year Seven (age 12) children in my class, which is too many to have in a class at one time, so I teach them in two lots of eight. We run 45 minute sessions each day, and that's the only amount of time I spend on air with the children. The rest of the time they're at home working with the papers and print material that we send them. Their parents or a governess will look after the kids while they do their work.
Most subjects we can teach. We do the basics, of course, the mathematics, the language, the reading (though mime falls flat). We do manage with things like science activities and experiments, but you have to make sure that whatever you're using in your lesson is something the children can easily get access to, because they can't slip out to the corner-store and buy stuff for the lesson. You must you use common, everyday things they can get hold of.
A lot of our children participate in music on air. We have a violin group that plays violins and cellos – we have a music teacher here who does that. It's very difficult to do that on air and hold your telephone at the same time because you need two hands, but the kids have worked it out. They hold their phones between their knees, that sort of thing, and they do very well at it, it's amazing how they progress. My wife (who also works here at the school as a teacher aid) and I do cooking lessons on air. The children do it at home while we do it in the studio here, live on air – the children love it.
It's not that different from a conventional school except with our kids, all their work is homework, because we only see them for such a short time each day. Also they really look forward to that 45 minutes on air with me every day because they get to talk to the other kids. Otherwise they are so isolated, there might be just one child on a property whose neighbour might live 200 kilometres away and it gives those kids a sense of belonging to a real class.
I have a child in my class, for example, who lives way up on the Gulf of Carpentaria near Normanton, and I have another one who is right down on the south Australian border at Birdsville. Those kids are 1,000 kilometres apart, and yet they talk to one another every day and I think that's great, because they don't have the access to the usual things that children get in town. They don't have access to the libraries and the swimming pools and the cinemas.
But there are a lot of advantages too. A lot of the families are very close-knit and the kids are really well brought-up, they are lovely kids to teach, they still have good manners. I love going out to the stations to visit them, they are just salt of the earth, genuine, great people and I love being invited into their homes to see their lifestyle.
The remoteness does cause problems, especially with weather. It's often difficult for them to get into town because their roads are rough and sometimes flooding keeps them away from town for weeks and weeks at a time. And, of course, they lead a lifestyle that's pretty rough at times, with horses and motorbikes; if there's an accident, that's often a time for trauma because we're all dependant on the flying doctor out here.
Internet broadcasts with cameras is probably a little down the track for us. We do use the internet for research, but it's difficult for the kids because they don't have broadband and it's pretty slow, so we find we have to be really patient.