Were the good ol’ days really so good?
Written by Tanya Heaslip
One of the greatest challenges for families living in isolated outback Australia is the need to educate their children.
Correspondence School and School of the Air lessons fortunately make primary school study possible, which is all thanks to the vision and hard work of pioneers such as John Flynn, Alf Traeger and Adelaide Miethke OBE.
In the 1960s and 70s I did primary school lessons on our station, Bond Springs. I studied the ‘3 R’s’’ through Correspondence School (Adelaide) and School of the Air (Alice Springs) and loved every minute of it.
But there was no opportunity to learn social skills, or to play sport, or learn art, or music.
Today, things have improved beyond anything I could have imagined.
When I shouted through the static of our two-way radio every morning, ‘Sierra Victor Uniform to VJD, good morning Mrs Hodder, over,’ I could never have dreamt of the possibilities available in 2020.
With state-of-the-art facilities, School of the Air Australia wide now enables bush kids to actually see their classmates and their teachers on a screen. The curriculum has broadened enormously as a result, with art, dance, music and even sport included in lessons.
This is in large part tanks to the tireless work of ICPA and dedicated teachers. The gap between educating bush children and city children is lessened every day.
I still think that’s a miracle!
But challenges remain.
Parents and children are still isolated and nothing can really prepare an isolated bush child for the shock of sitting in a city classroom with other students and a live teacher for the very first time.
Secondary education for bush children remains an even greater challenge. Teenagers do need to engage with the outside world to learn survival skills for life. Hence, I gather boarding school is still considered one of the best options for bush children once they reach their teens.
That was certainly the view in the 60s and 70s, when the NT government actually paid a subsidy to bush parents to send their children away. The government did this because it couldn’t offer a decent secondary education alternative here. As a result, children were usually around twelve or thirteen when they were dispatched to cities for their first year of secondary education – far, far away from home. They had to stay a whole five years if they were to matriculate, and become self-reliant to survive.
The emotional and mental cost of such a transition was enormous. How could it have been otherwise? Bush children, particularly back when I was growing up, knew only cattle, horses, stockmen, family, and the freedom of the bush. We rarely had experience being separated from our families, especially our mothers, and we knew almost nothing of city life. Boarding schools back in the 60s and 70s, especially for girls, were Victorian in style, and we students ended up being more isolated behind stone walls than we’d ever been in the outback. We saw our families only three times a year, communication was limited to weekly letters and telegrams in emergencies, and the homesickness, fear and sense of alienation that went with such restrictions were rampant and immeasurable.
Of course, it wasn’t just the child, but also the family left behind, who grieved. Their loved one had been taken from their care and sent off into the wide world alone – for a good cause, it was agreed by one and all – but that didn’t lessen the loss.
Fortunately, organisations like ICPA have fought tirelessly over the decades to bring these emotional and mental issues to the attention of boarding schools. ICPA has changed the way boarding schools engage with children from the bush – and that is much for the better. There is now support, a lot of it, and most importantly, parents have a voice. Parents, friends and family can speak to their children through mobile phone calls and texts, see their faces through FaceTime or Skype, and share emails, photos and pretty much everything about home that the child might be missing, except for smells. Nothing can replicate the aromas of bulldust in the cattle yards or the sweetness of a horse!
But those communication tools were not even a dream in the 60s and 70s.
Moreover, the parents back then had No Voice.
When I went to my Methodist boarding school in Adelaide, Mum lost all say in my life the day she handed me over to their custody. In fact, Mum lost all rights to us for the duration of the time we were inside that school.
The Headmistress, and her (mostly) unsympathetic mistresses, assumed loco parentis control of our lives, and nothing Mum could say or do or write or champion could affect or impact that. Even a personal letter by Mum to the Headmistress, pleading for help and intervention for me in my first year when I was struggling, was resolutely ignored. As were Mum’s phone calls to the Headmistress.
Mum didn’t even receive the courtesy of a reply saying, ‘no we can’t help’ or even better ‘don’t worry, your daughter is doing fine’ (although I wasn’t).
She received nothing.
Radio silence.
But that was a very deliberate approach by the boarding schools of the time.
Boarding schools took the view that there should be no communication, or at the least very little, with family, as it was the quickest and most effective way of ‘breaking the child into its new life.’ It was the same approach taken by the military, a well-known strategy, and a very successful one. You take a gaggle of individuals from the outside world, herd them together into one space, break them down through isolation, rules, and punishment, until they are just one group speaking with one voice, obedient and structured. The boarding school approach, eerily similar to the military, was to break the child’s link with the life they had come from in order to fully adapt to a new one.
There were obviously pros and cons with that approach. I suspect it works better with volunteers, adults, people who have some life understanding to manage it. For a naïve, twelve-year-old child with no worldly knowledge, it was brutal and confusing.
Likewise, for the parents.
On the few occasions Mum came to Adelaide, Mum had to write or telegram in advance to seek an appointment to see me, which in turn had to be approved in a special book, and it was subject to my behaviour. If and when it was granted, it was on limited and very strict terms. We received about two or three precious hours for a visit outside the school, and about one hour of a visit inside, where we had to sit in a special waiting room next to the mistresses’ study.
As a result, Mum suffered enormous mental anguish for years, as it wasn’t just me who went to boarding school, but I was followed by M’Lis, Brett and Ben.
Mum’s rage and fury at the injustice of it all – and powerlessness of parents over their own children – grew.
One day she finally decided to do something about it.
She became one of the founding members of the NT ICPA and its first NT President. She started – and has never stopped – championing the rights of bush children and particularly for children at boarding school.
She also became the first Chairman of St Philip’s College and pushed hard to grow the school so that bush parents would have a local option if they didn’t want to send their children south, or east, or west. She worked tirelessly to ensure they had secondary education opportunities here equivalent to any school in the cities.
Mum was involved in designing the boarding school windows of St Philip’s to make sure the panes overlooked the red ranges of Central Australia. She wanted boarders to gaze upon a landscape they knew and loved. She was desperate to ensure they weren’t homesick; or if they were, they could be comforted. Because Mum knew one thing for sure. The grief and homesickness that children sent away to boarding school felt included the wild, outback land itself, which had nourished and sustained them for all the early years of their life. A rapid transition to concrete, asphalt and stone walls was akin to being thrown in prison, with no stars, no sun, and no earth underfoot. She was determined it would be different for children at St Philip’s.
For so many reasons, I have much for which to thank Mum.
She and Dad slaved and sacrificed everything to send me away so I could have a good education. She suffered herself, but never once said, ‘You have to come home.’ Instead she turned her energies into creating better opportunities for children who came after us.
And I did receive a brilliant education. The school might have been entirely absent kindness and community care, but it excelled in education.
So I got to use my passion for reading and writing to go on to university and study law. I was the first NT School of the Air student to undertake such a strange venture. I was then the first to graduate in law. Receiving my Bachelor of Laws and Graduate Diploma in Legal Practice, and then admission to the bar in Adelaide and Darwin and Perth, and finally the High Court of Australia, was a privilege and an honour that would never have been open to me had I not gone away to boarding school.
Our outback society has also come a long way. The rights of children and parents in the bush have improved significantly. The balance has shifted. Bush children now have new opportunities during primary years which while not completely reducing the challenges of isolation, certainly go a long way towards overcoming them (even if it’s a ‘satellite down’ these days, rather than wireless static, that stops a lesson in its tracks!) And bush children who have to go away to boarding school now have a wonderful option in Alice Springs – which is not so far, and is still in the outback – or if the children do go interstate, boarding schools are very different beasts today. There, parents do have a voice.
I look in awe at the vibrant, invigorated ICPA of 2020, filled with young hopeful parents, all enthusiastic and committed to better education outcomes for their children.
And I think, ‘Don’t ever stop. Your work is invaluable. You have no idea how much.’
Tanya Heaslip was raised on a cattle station in Central Australia during the 1960s and 70s and learnt about the outside world through the Correspondence School, School of the Air and storybooks. She spent many hours dreaming of the overseas lands depicted in those studies and stories. Tanya went away to boarding school as a twelve-year-old, which later led to her becoming a lawyer, but she never stopped dreaming. In between practising law, she travelled to many of those lands, and later wrote about both her bush life and travel experiences ‘Alice to Prague’ (AU 2019) and ‘An Alice Girl’(AU 2020). Tanya will release her third memoir next year ‘Beyond Alice’ (AU 2021), which focuses on those boarding school years, with lashings of outback adventures in between! Tanya now lives back in Alice Springs with her husband. She is the President of the NT Writers’ Centre.