The Best Australian Essays 2015 by Geordie Williamson

Author:Geordie Williamson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Schwartz Publishing Pty. Ltd

Remote Control: Ten Years of Struggle and Success in Indigenous Australia

Noel Pearson

I

I’ve been to many remote places in Australia, but this is entirely new to me. I don’t know the desert. From the air, the vastness of the rolling dunes, green after the summer rain, is beguiling, as is the mild weather when we land. But I’ve been to enough places in the north of the country to know that come October this land is harder than any place I know. I’m travelling to the Pilbara with a former Western Australian state parliamentarian, Tom Stephens, whom I invited onto the board of an organisation that supports schools with tackling literacy. Stephens was a member for electorates in the Pilbara and the Kimberley and has been travelling to remote communities for the past thirty years.

The Martu leader at Jigalong, Brian Samson, picks us up from the charter and takes us to the school. Outside the gates, we are met as if royalty. Student leaders, the principal, Shane Wilson, and members of staff are there, replete with a welcome banner. We are as excited as they are. For the next three hours, we are taken on a tour of the school, visiting every classroom. After seven weeks of the Direct Instruction approach to teaching, the Jigalong School is moving. It reminds me of three schools in Cape York that started using Direct Instruction five years ago. It is doing as well as, if not better than, we were in our first term. What strikes me about the school is the quality of its leadership and the commitment of its teachers. Armed with an instructional program that works, the teachers and students are turning a virtuous circle. Students experiencing learning success means that teachers experience teaching success.

Samson is like me. Although I am from the coast and he is from the desert, he and I could well be brothers. We share a fierce hope for these children. He brought a crew of Martu leaders and educators to Cape York last year to visit our schools, and told me the first priority of Martu’s native title organisation, the Western Desert Lands Aboriginal Corporation, is to ensure Martu children get a good education. There are more than half a dozen state and independent schools in the Pilbara region and on Martu land, which Martu children attend, more or less. Attendance levels are an obvious challenge.

Samson’s aim was to bring this eclectic bunch of schools into an alliance. Each school would adopt the Direct Instruction program. Kids who travelled between communities and shifted schools could pick up in their new school where they had left off in their old.

I look at Samson, see his weariness and the obvious ravages of a whitefella diet of flour and sugar on his giant body. He could well think the same of me. The Martu have been embroiled in various controversies concerning mining and environmental protection. I know what Samson has been going through. Leadership in our world is full of strife and controversy.

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