Bush Kids

I've had a great week working in schools more than 300km west of here.

Generally, I traveled by road, but one day was fly-in, fly-out, which is a great time-saver. It also brings me into contact with people working for other agencies, which is always interesting.

In education, we work on a developmental model, whilst in health the diagnostic - therapeutic model is the norm. I believe that this is one reason why medicos (with notable exceptions) find dealing with people with disabilities very challenging. They're not - after all - ill.

It's strange, therefore, that the kids I work with are categorized using a medical description of specific disabilities. It's probably time for a change.

Being an aircraft tragic adds another dimension to fly-in, fly-out. This week there was a change of aircraft (from Piper PA-42 Cheyenne Turbo to Beechcraft Super Kingair).

Apparently the Piper was in Melbourne having maintenance when someone taxied it into a lighting stanchion. This did it no good at all.I don't know what it did for the person responsible.

The Kingair was a bit newer, and somewhat roomier, but is apparently not so much of a rocket ship as the Cheyenne. Either represent a big improvement on driving.

But I digress... this is supposed to be about kids, not planes.

Essentially, one of the main reasons I continue to do this work is the fantastic feedback I get from the kids. Bush kids are different. They're usually pragmatic, honest, and will have a go at anything. Two spring to mind...

One is a year five boy with hemiplegia in a very small school.The first time I met him he had a bruise on his face. When I asked him how he got it, he said simply "playing footy".

His teacher told me that he played second row in the school team. He has a wobbly gait, and his left arm is not all that functional. He tucks the ball under this arm, and fends with the other one (the right) which functions very well indeed. His unpredictable gait makes him very hard to tackle. He's a very popular player and has won "Best and fairest".

The other one is a year nine lad also with mild cerebral palsy in a slightly bigger (but quite isolated) school. A few months ago I helped his parents identify a notebook computer small enough for him to carry from class to class, which he links to a roll-up keyboard. This works well, as it boots up quickly, and he can keyboard his work at the same speed as the other kids write. What he produces is also legible.

Unfortunately, he locked himself out of this laptop, and for reasons not well understood, it stubbornly refused to let him log on. The school's IT teacher spent the best part of a day trying to get him in, but finally gave up in frustration.

On the day I turned up, he was getting desperate, as he couldn't access his work. I dug up the handbook, which gave directions on system retrieval. After he phoned his mum to check that it was OK for me to have a go at it, and after I phoned the manufacturer (ASUS) to check the procedure, we took our courage in both hands and ran the retrieval programme.

Fortunately, it worked, and he put in a new password. Now he wasn't going to let this happen again!

He insisted that I write down the password and put it in a sealed envelope which he gave to the support teacher to file safely. He also asked me to write down step-by-step the retrieval procedure in case it was necessary again in the future.

This setting up of a simple failsafe system was, to me, impressive, and an indication that he was demonstrating a sense of independence that is typical of bush kids.

I'm privileged to be able to work with these kids, their schools and parents. It's also great fun.

The Bleeding Obvious (Take Two)

Today the Courier Mail published a supplement with the statewide league tables of 2008 NAPLAN testing.

To read their editorial material over the years, you'd be excused for thinking that they had somehow opened up this data to scrutiny in the face of obdurate opposition from a education sector with something to hide. Apart from the fact that this information has been available for years on school websites, there hasn't been any political opposition from the current state government.

All that the supplement does is to make it easier to compare, although to my way of thinking, any parent too lazy to log on to the websites of the schools of interest to do his/her own research probably isn't going to make good decisions. I suppose there may be some parents without access to the internet, but then, the same material is available in hard copy on request from schools.

So the first myth busted is that of this information being hidden.

There is another myth being promoted by the Courier Mail.

This one is that private schools are a better bet when it comes to choosing schools if you want a high standard of literacy and numeracy. On the face of it, this may seem to hold water given the Courier's headline that "Private Schools Top the Class".

Looking at the data, it's clear that more private schools are positioned at the top of the league than state schools, although interestingly enough, many small state schools do very well - but can't be counted because of the sample size problem. Most of these are in the bush. These are the schools I support.

What becomes abundantly clear if you spend five minutes with the tables is that the clearest correlation is between high scores and socio-economic status of the feeder area. The private-public comparison is submerged in this, but the Courier pulls it out as a headline because it creates a political issue.

I suppose a headline reading "wealthy kids do better" doesn't create the controversy that the public-private debate does, and doesn't sell as many papers.

What is not measured and published for public scrutiny is the time lost in coaching students for the tests, the curriculum content (usually intrinsically interesting material such as music) abandoned, and the insidious effect that teaching to the test has on professional practice. What will become abundantly clear as the years roll by, will be a steady improvement in the results. This will have nothing to do with improving literacy and numeracy standards, and everything to do with schooling for the tests.

This is what has happened everywhere else in the world where standardised testing has been applied, and we're not going to be any different.

And it means nothing to the parents of the kids I work with, many of whom have absolutely no choice as to where they send their kids to school. These are students with disabilities, and in most parts (rural and metropolitan) of this state, the private schools simply won't enrol them.

These private schools are funded for the most part with taxpayers' money, and yet these parents can't enrol their kids in them.

Stinks a bit, doesn't it?

I wonder whether the Courier would run an editorial on that issue?

Coal4breakfast

As I travel west along the Warrego, I'm noticing heaps of crudely crafted signs referring to a group called Coal4breakfast.

They also have a website.

The first time I heard of them was at community cabinet at Toowoomba earlier in the year when they staged a well-organised (and well-mannered) picket as the cabinet ministers arrived. These people aren't smelly hippies - they're salt-of the-earth farmers from grain properties on the darling Downs.

Their beef is the taking out of coal-mining leases on prime wheat and barley-producing land by some of the more aggressive coal extraction organisations. These groups can see a handy profit to be made, and are aware of the existing infrastructure (particularly rail) ironically built to move the grain.

Already, the railways is refusing to carry grain unless the farmers enter into written up-front agreements. This results in an ever-increasing number of grain trucks on the highway, which are swiftly destroying the road. This problem goes as far west as Thallon.

So, apart from threatening the livelihood of the locals, wrecking the environment, and destroying the quality of life enjoyed in these townships, this industry is going to bugger the vital road infrastructure.

But it's OK, because the state government will make lots from the royalties, and the mining companies will also make a motsa.

Well - not if these people have anything to do with it.

Get behind them - there's plenty of coal to be sourced from areas not useful for other purposes, and we keep hearing how much is out there.

Bunfight

There's a Gary Shearston song called "It's On".

It was written by Don Henderson and released on Shearston's 1964 album "Songs of Our Time". I've got it hidden away in a cupboard somewhere - it was one of the first LPs I bought back when I was 17.

Part of it goes like this -

"All reason and logic are gone,
Winning the fight won't prove that you're right,
It's sad, it's true, but it's on".

Recalling this song reminds me of the current debate between true believers and sceptics about global warming. All reason and logic are gone because it's become a political issue rather than a scientific hypothesis.

To my simple way of looking at the world, there's no debate. Viewed as an issue of risk assessment and risk management, it's a no-brainer.

Given the consequences of continued warming, it makes a great deal of sense to take steps to avoid it, even if there are doubts as to the nature of the relationship between increasing CO2 concentrations and atmospheric temperatures. Besides, the carbon derived resources we use are finite, and we need to plan for a world where they are no longer available.

Let's just use our brains to make the necessary changes, and get on with it.

Otherwise, it will become the currency of conflict, and my kids don't need that. They'd like a world to live in.

Lunacy

It's 40 years since the first lunar landing.

Most of us who are old enough to have lived through it remember where we were and what we were doing on 20th July 1969. I remember it vividly.

I'd joined 7th Battalion about a month earlier, and was posted to a platoon. We were training in the Putty State forest area. It was bloody cold - we saw sleet occasionally. Training for tropical warfare in the middle of winter in the highlands is not necessarily logical, but this was the army, after all.

I remember one digger getting into hot water for wearing a balaclava. After a while, your ears got so cold that they went numb and lost all feeling, which was OK until you brushed against a tree or something - and they then hurt like hell. Because it was a tactical exercise, we weren't allowed fires or hootchies, so we were a bunch of miserable diggers.

The 20th, from memory, was the day the exercise ended, so we harboured as a company about lunchtime, and as the official exercise was over, were allowed to light fires and put up groundsheets to provide some sort of cover from the rain/sleet.

I remember putting my boots on the coals of a fire to warm them up whilst I dried my socks (and feet). I neglected the fact that the GP boots had a metal plate under the sole designed, I think, to protect feet from Panji spikes. When I put my boots back on, this plate was hot, and I had to unlace them and take them off again, to avoid burnt feet.The fact that I'd left putting the warmed-up boots on until the last minute, before we had to march off for some de-briefing or other was a problem.

I was abused by my platoon Sergeant because I broke ranks to take my boots off. This was a better option than burnt feet.

We were due to be flown back to Liverpool next day on board a Caribou, and were organised into "sticks" for this purpose. My mate and I got organised, built a carefully engineered hootchie, and put one of the blankets from our sleeping kit across the end of the hootchie to keep the wind out. Next morning, when we let the shelter down, the blanket eerily stayed up. It had frozen in place.

By the time we were due to em plane, a howling Westerly had developed, although the rain/sleet had stopped. The Caribou has a large vertical stabiliser, and as the motors were gunned for the take-off from the short dirt strip, the wind threatened to push it off the strip. We could see both pilots fighting with the control column to hold the ship straight. It wasn't reassuring.

We made it, but were the last flight out as the rest were cancelled that day. The best part of this was the fact that the platoon sergeant was on the next flight, and we had about twenty-fours hours of bliss when we did our own thing until he returned. We also spent the night in warm beds - more than could be said for those left out in the donga.

Somebody told us when we got back to Sydney that the moon landing had happened the day before. So it happened when I was freezing my tail off training for tropical warfare in sleet. Somehow the significance of the event was lost in the absurdity of my own situation.

Yep - I remember.

(The second picture is from the 7RAR publication " Seven in Seventy").

Update -In response to Wilbo43's comment, here's a pic of a "Hootchie".

Short Finals

At last - an excuse to post a video.

This sequence was shot using my very basic Olympus C-310 - hence no sound. I was in the right-hand seat of a Piper PA-42-720 Cheyenne III on short finals into Roma, in the late afternoon.

Thanks are due to Eddie (the Pilot) and our local (Western) bureaucrats who cooperate, and have broken down the silo walls between the agencies.

It saves a lot of driving, and the Queensland taxpayers more than a few dollars.

Bowen

Bowen has always been Somewhere Else.

When I was a kid in Carmila, I learned about Bowen in grade six. Apparently there was a time when it had been considered as the capital of Queensland. This was because of a combination of reasons to do with its central location, and its harbour.

Longreach has been viewed in the same way - it's a pity that the idea was discarded. Perhaps if either Bowen or Longreach were the capital, we might develop an ethos in government more in tune with Queensland's needs... but that's another story.

Later when I lived in Townsville, I often attended conferences in Bowen. Invariably they were held in seaside locations and there was plenty of alcohol consumed. It was usually warm, and always difficult to get enthusiastic about anything much. In hindsight - Bowen was probably not the right place for serious conferencing.

We also used to stay at Bowen on our annual trip north with children. We generally didn't have time to do much except transit, although I have unearthed old photos of the kids playing in the sand at Horseshoe Bay - so we obviously had a day or two there.

On this trip we decided to stay at Bowen for reasons of nostalgia, and booked a basic unit which fronted the bay. You could walk from your front door to the beach in thirty paces. It was warm, people ambled by at first and last light, and dogs and kids played on the beach. The walls were thin, and the couple next door were amorous and noisy. Somehow it seemed entirely in keeping with the environment.

Bowen was discovered with the shooting of "Australia". This has resulted in an influx of Japanese backpackers. They're generally decorative, spend money, and are probably good for the place. Bowen has an atmosphere of its own - a bit like an old woman - once beautiful - but now looking faded. Generally, it's charming and laid back.

We walked, ate, slept and enjoyed the seascape. I wonder what you'd pay for a block with a sea view?