From Emu Plains, it takes two to three hours, depending on the state of the unsealed road, to get to the remote desert community of Gibbs Crossing. Originally gazetted as a gold town over a hundred years ago, and once with a population of over 9,000 people, the town now serves as a base for several groups of Aboriginal people. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (2007) census data reports a population of 1,162 in 1996 and 898 in 2001; forty three per cent Indigenous. These figures include workers at a number of fly‐in, fly‐out mining operations in the area. The local shire council reports the population of the town in recent years to be around 300, with the Aboriginal population making up more than half of this number (Agreements, Treaties and Negotiated Settlements Project, 2007). The average individual taxable income for taxpayers in the local shire for the financial year 1999/2000 was $37,473.00, and unemployment during the time of the study ranged between 1.8per cent in March 1999 and 4.2per cent in June 2000 (Department of Local Government and Regional Development, 2003).
The oldest and most permanent‐looking building in the town is the hotel. Most of the other buildings of any note are demountables, trucked in for services such as the Aboriginal Medical Service, the police, Family and Children’s Services and other agencies who serve the community. There are about 20 dwellings in the town. Not all the families who live in the community live in houses. Some live in informal camps, constructed from wire mesh and trailer tarpaulins. Others live in “outstations”, in what were once called “transitional housing”, designed for remote Aboriginal settlements as transition housing as Aboriginal people moved from missions or reserves – small steel sheds with a bathroom and laundry attached.
The four or five patches of green in the town were all enclosed by chain‐link fences; a recreation oval, the police compound, the caravan park and the hotel. The largest grassed area belonged to the school. Inside the two‐metre high fence, topped with barbed wire, there were several demountable classrooms, a demountable pre‐school centre, an old school building and a demountable manual arts building. The well‐tended gardens contained an above‐ground swimming pool, sheds for the school buses, an aviary, and a laundry and shower block. At the time of the study, staff included the Principal and six teachers. Support staff included two Aboriginal Education Officers, a part‐time Registrar, a Pre‐school Teaching Assistant, a gardener, a cleaner and a number of other community members who were employed in the school kitchen and laundry. There were around 70 students enrolled, grouped in six classes; pre‐school, year one and two, year two and three,
upper primary (years 4‐7), secondary and special education. Only three or four of the total student body were non‐Indigenous. The school served a highly mobile population. Apart from a small core of children, the group of children enrolled at the school in the first semester could be entirely different from the group of children enrolled later in the year. However, most of the children were enrolled at the school at some point during each year. A number of programs were offered by the school; breakfast and a hot midday meal was provided, as well as school uniforms, showers and laundering facilities. The Aboriginal Medical Service visited the school daily to attend to children’s health issues, mainly ear infections, parasites and skin sores. A school bus transported children daily to and from school from the out of town camps and outstations, and there were numerous camps and excursions for children who attended school with any regularity. The school received significant extra funding due to its remote community school status, and was well resourced in terms of equipment and teaching resources.
Gibbs Crossing Remote Community School did not participate in the current study in the same way as the other schools. The school had been recruited as part of another study (Hill, Comber, Louden, Rivalland & Reid, 1998; 2002) and Catherine, the teacher who took the junior primary class, expressed her desire to participate in this study. However, because of the remoteness of the school and the difficulties in accessing the site on a regular basis, the school was only included in the study for the first year. For this reason, the leadership structures, staffing profile, policies and programs at this school have been described here only as they applied to Catherine, the teacher whose case study appears in chapter six, during her time at the school. A more complete description of this site appears elsewhere (Hill et al, 1998; 2002). Catherine was selected as a case study teacher in this project and her experiences are further described in chapter six.
The principal of the school while Catherine was at Gibbs Crossing was a man with many years teaching experience, who had held the position of Principal at that school for some time. His wife held the part‐time position of school registrar. The school employed a number of Aboriginal community members; two ladies operated the school laundry, where children could change into a school uniform for the day while their own clothes were laundered. These ladies also maintained and laundered the school’s stock of uniforms and the towels that were available for children who used the showers at school. Other community members ran the school kitchen, which provided morning tea and a substantial
hot meal at lunchtime. At various times, community members were also employed to maintain the school buses and the school grounds.
The local Aboriginal Health Service had a mobile unit at the school, and came daily to do ear washes and to attend to skin sores and other medical problems. The Principal took the school bus out each day to collect children from the outlying camps and outstations, and to return them again at the end of the day. Sometimes, community members from these camps or stations would get a lift into town with the school bus. The four‐year‐old Kindergarten children were accommodated on four full days each week as part of the Pre‐ primary program. As well as the four regular classes, there was also a “Special Education” class for those children who could not cope with the demands of the mainstream classrooms. The school employed two Aboriginal Education Officers, one of whom had been employed at the school for sixteen years. In her third year at the school, Catherine encouraged the younger of these women to enrol in a teacher education program for Aboriginal Education Officers at Batchelor College of Education.
This concludes the description of the organisational structures and staff profiles of the schools together with their school‐level policies and programs. As might be expected, there were a number of similarities that were evident across all the schools. Student‐ related characteristics included populations of Aboriginal children enrolled at all of the schools, and with this, the transience of some students. There were also quite high numbers of students at each school who were at risk both in terms of health (mainly issues connected with nutrition and hearing impairment) and achievement of desired literacy outcomes. The health issues were observed to relate mostly to Aboriginal children, but the issues connected with achievement of literacy outcomes were apparent in both Aboriginal and non‐Aboriginal children. Teacher‐related characteristics that were similar across all the schools included the difficulties they experienced in attracting and retaining teachers, and the fact that teachers in these schools were mainly new graduates, early career teachers or teachers who had trained overseas and newly arrived in Australia. There were also evident some differences between the schools. The most obvious differences were between schools in regional centre and the more rural schools, and these pertained to access to supports such as outside agencies for the provision of health or speech pathology services, or for staff to access to opportunities for professional development, or amenities that supported their personal lives, such as shops, sports and social organisations or restaurants and cinemas. Even though they were both located in the same regional centre, there were quite significant differences between the actual
schools at Bridgewater and Mineside. Mineside was more like the rural schools and this was probably due to the fact that it served a population that was almost entirely Aboriginal. Being a difficult to staff school, there was a high turnover of staff and there were also high numbers of children who were identifies as being at risk, both in terms of health and literacy achievement. The approaches to teaching did not differ significantly but the pace of the day seemed to be much more brisk at Bridgewater; classes started on time and ran at a steady pace without the interruptions that came from various health and other professionals seeing individual children, as occurred at Mineside. The children at Mineside were always busy, but because many of the children were collected by a bus which had to make at least two trips because it could not accommodate them all at once, and because some children, once they arrived at school, had showers and breakfast, the day was slow to get started at Mineside.
Another noticeable difference across all schools was that of the school culture. Similar to my experiences in different schools as an early career teacher, there were some schools in which I felt more comfortable, more accepted and more part of the school than some others, where I most definitely felt like a visitor. These issues connected with school culture are a part of the discussion that emerges later in the case studies and ensuing discussion.