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.I saw him to his gate, where we exchangedthe usual rushed and fatuous expressions of thanks and goodwill,and he disappeared down the walkway.I watched him go, thenturned and walked back to the car.I had a day to kill before flyingon to Western Australia, and I wasn t at all certain how I was goingto fill it.I headed into town for the business district to find a bankmachine and buy a newspaper, but en route I passed a sign for theSchool of the Air, down a side street, and impetuously I decided tohave a look.I didn t expect a great deal, but it was terrific.What a lot ofnice surprises Alice Springs was throwing up.The School of theAir was in an anonymous building on a residential street.It con-sisted of a reception area where the children s work was displayedon tables and around the walls, two small studios, a large meetingroom, and that was about it.Although there are seventeen schoolsof the air in Australia now, Alice Springs is the grandmotherof them all and still covers the largest and emptiest area.It was aSaturday, so no lessons were in progress, but a very nice man washappy to show me around and tell me how it worked.The idea was simple enough: to provide formal schooling andsome sense of classroom experience for kids growing up on cattlestations or other lonely spots something it has been dutifully do-ing since 1951.Lonely is certainly the key word here.With a catch-ment area of 468,000 square miles that is an area roughly twicethe size of France the Alice Springs school has just 140 pupilsspread between kindergarten and seventh grade.I retain astrangely vivid and influential memory of watching a film about itat school when I was eight or nine, and of being extremely takenwith the notion of being hundreds of miles from your teacher,entrusted with your own microphone and shortwave radio set,and free to sit there buck naked with a plate of cookies if youchose since no one could see you.All of these seemed incalculable268 B i l l B r y s o nimprovements on the situation that prevailed at Greenwood Ele-mentary in Des Moines, Iowa.So the romance of radio learninghas never quite left me.I was disappointed, therefore, to discoverthat the radio portion has never been more than a tiny and inciden-tal part of the program.The School of the Air is and always hasbeen essentially a correspondence course, which doesn t sound any-thing like as appealing.Even so, the place had a very real charm and air of goodwill.The bulletin boards were filled with illustrated essays from kids ofabout eleven describing life on their stations and what a typical daywas like for them.I read every one with absorption. Would you like to listen to a lesson? the man in chargeasked me. Very much, I said.He took me into a side room and put on a tape recording of aday s lesson for five-year-olds.It consisted mostly of a perkyteacher going through the roll call, saying,  Good morning, Kylie.Can your hear me? Over.After a moment there would be a faint crackle, as of a trans-mission from a very distant galaxy, and sounds almost recognizableas human speech, but much too indistinct to be deciphered. I say good morning, Kylie.Are you there? Can you hear me?Over.This time there would be a pause and no response at all, just arather poignant interval of dead air.Then:  Well, let s try Gavin,then.Good morning, Gavin.Are you there? Over.More crackle and then a small, tinny voice would come back: Good morning, Miss Smith.And so it went, with some voices coming in loud and clear, butmany others fading in or out, or proving totally unreachable.As Ilistened to this, I also read a little booklet I had bought where I wasfrankly taken aback to discover that each child spends only half anhour a day (actually,  up to half an hour a day ) on the radio, plusten minutes a week in a private tutorial with his or her teacherhardly a lavish amount of personal attention.For the rest, they areexpected to spend five to six hours a day working under the super-vision of a parent or nanny.The students also make use of tele-visions, VCRs, and personal computers, but there wasn t evidenceof this anywhere.The conclusion to which you are reluctantly butinescapably drawn is that it is forever 1951 at the School of the Air.I n a S u n b u r n e d C o u n t r y 269The real surprise, however, was that there seemed to be noAboriginal children involved certainly none were evident in thephotographs.The population of the Northern Territory is about 20percent Aboriginal overall, but in the far outback the proportion ismuch higher.I asked the man about that on my way out. Oh, there are some, he said. I m not sure how many just atthe moment, but there are a few.The problem is that the pupilshave to be supervised by a competent adult, you see.I waited a moment, then said,  I m sorry, I don t see. They need a reliable, conscientious adult with core languageand reading skills. And Aboriginal parents don t have that?He looked unhappy, as if this was a route we really shouldn tbe traveling down. No, I m afraid not.Not always. But if you re not giving the kids the lessons because the par-ents can t help them, then those kids, when they become parents,won t have the core skills either, will they? Yes, it s a problem. And so it will just go on forever? It s a very big problem. I see, I said, though of course I didn t really see at all.afterward i continued into town.I bought a newspaperand took it to an open-air café on Todd Street, a pedestrian mall.Iread for a minute or two, but then found myself just watching thepassing scene.It was quite busy with Saturday shoppers.The peo-ple on the street were overwhelmingly white Australians, but therewere Aborigines about, too not great numbers of them, but al-ways there, on the edge of frame, unobtrusive, nearly always silent,peripheral.The white people never looked at the Aborigines, andthe Aborigines never looked at the white people.The two racesseemed to inhabit separate but parallel universes.I felt as if I wasthe only person who could see both groups at once.It was verystrange.A very high proportion of the Aborigines looked beaten up.Many had puffy faces, as if they had wandered into a hornet snest, and an almost absurdly high number sported bandages onshins, elbows, foreheads, or knees.A label at the Strehlow exhibi-tion, which I had seen the day before, had been at pains to stress270 B i l l B r y s o nthat the most ruined Aborigines were those one saw in towns.Theidea, I guess, was to inform visitors like me that one shouldn tjudge all Aborigines by these mild wrecks seen shuffling throughthe streets.Nonetheless, it struck me as an odd and paternalisticthing to say, in that it seemed to imply that Aborigines had twochoices in their lives: to stay on the missions and prosper, or comeinto town and fall into penury and dereliction [ Pobierz caÅ‚ość w formacie PDF ]