Seven Seasons in Aurukun: My unforgettable time at a remote Aboriginal school

By Paula Shaw

A well-crafted memoir of a young woman who spends two years teaching at the school at Aurukun in Cape York paints a colourful picture of life in a remote Aboriginal community in the sweltering tropics.

Paula Shaw recounts her experiences of two years teaching at the school at Aurukun in Cape York. She paints a colourful picture of life in a remote Aboriginal community in the sweltering tropics. With the place itself as much of a character as her colleagues, the traditional owners and the eccentric whitefellas who congregate in faraway places, it is a taste of the intensity of relationships in a small community.

Seven Seasons in Aurukun also offers an insight into the everyday realities of alcoholism, violence and welfare dependency in Aboriginal communities, and the struggle to make a difference in the face of such chronic problems. Yet we also see the persistence efforts of community leaders to improve their circumstances and maintain culture, and the small achievements that make the difference between survival and going under.

Seven Seasons in Aurukun is the runner up to the 2007 Iremonger Award for Writing on Public Issues.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Allen & Unwin
• Release date: Mar 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781741766295

Book preview

Eight streets

It is my last few hours here in amazing, beautiful, terrible, tragic, fantastic, unbelievable Aurukun. There is a breeze stirring and clouds are massing, bringing a premature darkness to the steamy afternoon. The new church with its bright red doors is nearly finished, and soon the mounds of dirt that have been put to good use as a bumpy, jumpy bike track will be smoothed flat. The kids will be sad to see those piles of dirt go.

I have walked a last lap of the top end of town, with skinny, scabby, pregnant dogs licking at over-ripe mangoes—orange guts oozing from split skins—looking for people who were variously out hunting or asleep or just not there. Not many people were around at all except for a bunch of kids splashing and squealing in the newly re-opened eye-stingingly chlorinated pool. Just a few women sitting under big old almond trees, and girls braiding their sisters’ hair.

And finally it seems real to me that I am leaving. I’ve been here for not even two years—not a long time out of a life—and there is so much I still don’t know, won’t ever understand: things that mystify, astound, inspire and appal me about this place. But it’s under my skin now. The red dust under my fingernails and deep in the creases of my feet, the purplish scar from a tropical ulcer on my leg, will be washed, scrubbed away and fade. There is more, though, that inhabits a deeper tissue.

FIRST TERM

1

Aurukun arrival

Nervous as hell and verging on nauseous. An hour and a half into the two-hour flight on a burring buzzing seven-seater plane that is taking me far away from anyone and anything I know. I swallow hard and make myself take some deep breaths, desperately seeking to relocate the conviction that this is what I really have wanted to do for a long time.

At least Henrietta, my sister’s dog—a slightly podgy border collie–kelpie cross—is with me; someone who knows me, someone to hold onto. Known to me. She is a dog, but, still, she’s a precious happy adventurous spirit. She’s always had a bent for getting out and exploring. Despite being stuck in a cage at the back of the plane she looks calmer than I feel. Hopefully landing won’t disturb her as much as take-off did. That high-pitched piercing bark is a noise nobody likes. Everyone has been very polite about it and grimaced, while blocking their ears.

There isn’t much to see out the window for most of the trip, just a blanket of cloud that jolts and leaps as the hot air currents toss the little plane across and down and back up again. I hold my breath through the worst bits and grip onto the seat in front of me. But as we descend towards Aurukun, the three enormous rivers that meet the sea at this place are dark and wide and snaking. Between them, the land is green and steamy and decorated with little bright-green splotches: lagoons filled with lilies.

So this is it then. My first view of this small place in a vast landscape, a tiny dot of red dusty streets and an airstrip in a green forever that stretches to the sea.

We arrive. The airport is a red-roofed tin shed plonked beside the shining black of the tarmac. The heat rises in waves. I’m being introduced to people, other whitefella teachers—some new like me, and others who are old hands, people who have been here for six months or more. Gloria, one of the old hands, drives me and another of the teachers, Geoff, around town and she tells me there are only eight streets so I won’t get lost. What I see from the window of her big white Toyota ute: the local people, sheltering from the brutally bright afternoon sun, the houses painted pastel blues and pinks and oranges, and everywhere the tall fences barbed across the top, tall mango trees, sparse thin gums and dark-trunked trees with plate-sized deep green leaves go by too fast to make a sensible picture. My t-shirt is striped with sweat from the creases where my tummy rolls when I sit, and the glare and the steam make the roads shimmer.

My head is spinning, the humidity and the heat make me dizzy and I am totally disoriented. It will take me a good week to feel really confident in finding my way round the two corners between my house and the school. Kind of pathetic, but there is a lot to take in.

Gloria drops Geoff and me off at the gate of the house that is to be my home for the next year. Geoff is unlocking the gate to the yard of the big peach-coloured highset old fibro house when a tall white guy comes running round the side of the house flapping his long arms and swearing like a mongrel.

‘Fucking huge wasps’ nest!’ he yells to us by way of explanation, and greeting.

Geoff introduces me to Blake. He is lanky, with a big nose and a goofy smile. Blake works with the town construction crew, but he is here because the house has been broken into and he is trying to repair the security grille—which apparently is under a fucking huge wasps’ nest. Neither of the boys seems too surprised or disturbed by the break-in, so I play cool with this news too.

We go inside. It looks as though the place has been ransacked—there are papers and clothes and leftover food all over the place. I wonder to myself how I will live in a place where such occurrences are ordinary enough not to shock.

After inspecting each room, Geoff, an old-hand teacher of six months’ experience, says, ‘It doesn’t look like they’ve touched anything.’

Then, ‘Aw—hang on, I think they nicked my Minties!’

We laugh, and I feel an instant affection for the trespassers who stole only lollies, but a bit worried about the prospect of what it would be like to share a house with either of its current occupants. Geoff, the PE teacher, has been in the house with Kevin, another teacher, who moves his big frame slowly. Between them they’ve managed to create a bachelor pad where concepts of domesticity such as washing up or folding clothes appear to be completely absent. Kevin is apparently pretty keen to move in to one of the little units by himself, and because he has been here a year already, he has first dibs. When he comes around after Geoff has shown me the house, he says hello and looks at me without seeing me. Part of the weight he carries seems to be a stony sadness. He tells me that he will have his stuff moved out by the end of tomorrow, and when Geoff is telling me that maybe he might stay in the house with me—that that would be better than me having to share with an old lady—Kevin gives him a long hard stare and shakes his head. I wonder what that means?

Then, a horrible noise. A screaming, yelping terror. My little woosy, city-savvy Henrietta is under the house getting to know the neighbours’ pets and not enjoying it much. Geoff runs downstairs and whacks the two big muscly pig-hunting dogs with a hard dull whoomp. They cower and run away back under the fence they’d crawled in under. Shit—straight into a much tougher reality than has ever been mine before.

Henny has some big gashes and is bleeding and feeling very sorry for herself. I feel instantly guilty and selfish for having brought her with me. She looks at me with her big deep eyes, begging me for something. Maybe to protect her, and I don’t know if I can do that here. I pat her and she leans limply against me.

Later in the day I learn that the two dogs belong to another of the teachers and that they have attacked other dogs and have even bitten a kid once. A local kid. The dogs have been handed down with the tenancy of the house to a series of teachers. Somewhere along the line someone decided it would be good to train them to be ‘colour sensitive’. I had to have that explained to me. It meant that they were taught to be calm and submissive to whitefellas, but to bark and bite and go their hardest when a Murri comes near.

There are hundreds of camp dogs that own the streets. They wander from house to house and no one is bothered, but local people are scared of the dogs that belong to whitefellas.

I feel sick that this is the state of race relations in a community where Aboriginal people make up over 90 per cent of the population. How can it be so bad?

I am a little disturbed too that it is other teachers who apparently have such attitudes. I’ve come to this place through the ‘Partners for Success’ strategy, which has been running for the past three years. It is supposed to be about finding appropriate teachers to work in Aboriginal communities. It is supposed to mean the teachers in these communities want to be there and want to work with local people to make a difference. I learn fast that recruiting teachers to schools in the Cape is like trying to fill a sieve with sand. For many people who do it, it has a lot more to do with getting fast-tracked into permanent positions in the city and saving for a house deposit than any particular passion for or interest in making a difference.

The teachers I meet in the first couple of days are mostly quite young. At twenty-six, I’m certainly not the youngest. For several of them this has been their very first teaching gig. They seem to know each other well and they tease and laugh with each other like siblings. They invite me to come out for a drive with them in a rugged-looking old jeep that has been painted a deep green and is known affectionately as Kermit. There is one bench seat in the front and nothing much at all in the back, except for a hole in the roof which once must have housed some kind of air vent. When Kermit makes it out past the end of the bitumen and into the green wooded bushland, the passengers in the back get to take turns standing up and poking their heads out through the roof.

This feels a bit like travelling, backpacking with a bunch of people you just happen to be in the same place with at the same time. But the stakes are higher. I am trying very hard to be friendly, smiling a lot and asking polite, interested questions of these people who might be my main social contact over the next couple of years. It feels strange being such a stranger. Not just to this group of people, but to this community, to this place, and as the car grunts and grumbles and heaves along, I am aware that I don’t have permission to be here. I’ve turned up from my big city life and landed in this place as a foreigner. The only people who even knew I was coming were the school principal and his wife. The only people who’ve said it is okay for me to come are people from the education department. No local people were even on the interview panel that selected me. Suddenly I feel like a trespasser, like a naughty kid.

I ask the other teachers whether they need to ask permission from local people to be out here. They tell me this place is okay and that anyone can come here. When it is my turn to poke my head out, I make a silent request—a lot like a prayer, really, but not to any god this time—to this place, to the trees and the tall green grass, to the red earth, that I might be allowed to be here. Something in the warm, clammy air, thick with buzzing insects and the scent of new rain, comforts me.

I learn a lot in my first week in town. As Gloria said, there are only eight streets, most of which are named after local animals in the traditional names—like kor’—brolga; and wuungkam—barramundi; ko’an—magpie goose; pikkuw—crocodile; kang kang—sea eagle; ku’—dog; and muttich—stingray. Then there’s MacKenzie Drive, named after the missionary and his wife who stayed here for over thirty years. Eight streets that hold the love affairs, the friendships, the families, the shopping, the eating, the beat-up bike-riding, all those scabby dogs. The drinking, the laughing, the fighting, the singing, the praying, the swearing, all of it. Those eight streets hold people’s lives.

In the first week I learn that I live in ‘the compound’: four houses that accommodate teachers, painted various shades of peach, surrounded by a seven-foot-high mesh-wire fence with barbed wire on the top. Each house in the compound has a large grassy yard with a smattering of mango trees, star fruit trees, and coconut and banana palms. Everything is dripping with tropical paradise green.

The houses in the compound look as though they were built in the mid-eighties, rectangular orangey boxes with dark-brown trims and a lot of wood veneer laminate in the kitchens. Unlike most of the other houses in town, they are high set, with shady concreted areas underneath. The interior of my house is painted pale grey, with thick black plastic skirting boards. The lino is old and torn in a few spots—wear and tear from high-rotation tenancies for twenty years. It’s prettier from the outside, but it is a big house and the prospect of putting my own things into it, to make it feel like home, is good. Exciting even. This will be the first time I can set up my things where I live the way I want to.

Geoff decides to move in to a unit by himself on another block in the compound. I learn from some of the other teachers that Kevin has done me a huge favour by encouraging Geoff to move. Apparently he wouldn’t win any ‘great housemate’ awards. Kevin didn’t seem to think he was going to miss sharing with Geoff. I am sharing with Lyn instead, who’s going to be setting up the Youth Strategy.

Because she’s only planning to stay for six months, Lyn hasn’t brought much with her. Just a big box of books and papers and posters which she calls her fruitcake, and a not-very-big bag of clothes. I’ve brought a lot more. As a permanent teacher with the education department, part of the transfer deal includes having whatever gear I want to bring with me transported up here by barge. It arrives a week and a half after I do. Old junky bits of furniture, hand-me-downs and street-side throw-out finds. I’ve brought crockery, pictures, books, my yoga mat, a mop. Compared with the complete household furniture packages, cars and boats that other people bring up here, my load is light. It isn’t much, but it’s mine. I’ve always moved into other people’s places with other people’s stuff defining the space as theirs. My stuff, my space?

I learn that after three o’clock in the afternoon, the streets are the domain of the kids, running and playing, and some who have bikes, usually far too big or too small for the kids riding them, hooning and skidding. There are some adults around, but many of them are up at the tavern, which opens at three. Two weeks before I arrived, Aurukun became one of the first communities on the Cape to get an Alcohol Management Plan. The AMP means that it is illegal to bring alcohol into the community or to drink in the streets. The tavern is open four hours a day, six days a week, and sells light beers. You can get a UDL (a can of pre-mixed spirits and soft drink) if you buy a meal, but you can only get those from the inside bar and you must be wearing shoes and a collared shirt to be allowed there, so it is, not exclusively, but mostly, the domain of the whitefellas.

The tavern is fairly new and the main bar, the outside bar, is really just a concrete slab with solid wooden picnic tables, a couple of pool tables, and a roof over it all. The bar has a big wooden fence set up, kind of like an old-fashioned cattle yard, to channel people through to the bar itself, where each person is allowed to purchase two light beers at a time—no stockpiling allowed. Yellow can, green can or red can. That is: Four-X gold, VB or Carlton mid-strength. Some young local Aboriginal people as well as whitefellas work at the bar, passing out pairs of drinks and opening the cans, to make it difficult for anyone to sneak one home for later. People queue patiently and then less and less so as closing time draws nearer.

It is crowded and gets noisier as the hours wear on. The twang of country music is a backdrop to a cacophony of loud conversations in local languages that roll and burble in my foreigner’s ears. As it gets louder and more crowded the air grows thick with the acidic stink of a full day’s sweat on a great many bodies. At least in the open-air setting the sweat, cigarette smoke and sharp tang of spilt sticky beer can dissipate more easily. It is standing room only with all the little picnic benches supporting rows of tiny bony and big and broad bums, in floral prints, shiny polyester and dark-blue work trousers, taking their rest.

I meet an old man called Laurence, who is from Mornington Island. He wears a big, once cream-coloured cowboy hat and a yellow Bonds t-shirt—tight enough to show that his ageing ringer’s body still has tone. He is very keen to talk to me and to tell me stories. He tells me the story of the Rat and the Squid—of how they were brothers who fought each other, how they crossed the river, how the whiskers of the rat had tickled the squid and how the rat speared the squid in the tail. Perhaps I look confused by the story because he tells me it four times over. As the beers soothe and relax him, he tells me ‘Love is love darling, love is beautiful’. He tells me he wants to sell me a painting.

In the first week I learn that the concrete bunker with roller doors and grubby, battered-looking walls, which has extra-high fences with extra rows of barbed wire, is the store. The only store. Inside, it is always pretty dark, but rarely any cooler than outside. There is a fan, but the heat from the fridges with their struggling hum seems to cancel out any coolness the fan produces. There you can buy a whole drum of flour, Black and Gold–brand dry goods, canned foods with use-by dates that range from valid to a couple of years out, defrosted sliced white bread, frozen meat, lollies, butter, a few sad-looking vegetables, and sometimes, fresh milk (but only if you are daring). The store is managed by a whitefella couple: two of the grumpiest, scowliest people I’ve ever met. They never smile, rarely look up to acknowledge you and treat everyone as though they are in the way. They don’t seem to be colour sensitive; they treat everyone like shit. Unlike the tavern, there isn’t much conversation in the store. People queue to make their purchases, keeping their eyes low.

But at the cashier is Fay, a ray of cynical sunshine in that dark little hellhole: the barbed-wire barricaded Bessa-brick bunker. She always asks how you are, takes an interest in what you’re buying (‘Oooh, doing some baking today, then?’), tells