"What we want is to see the child in pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in pursuit of the child." - George Bernard Shaw
Australia is an urban society, nothing represents it better than acres of suburbia. But marginal suburbs are on the tip of the Australian wilderness and the bush is central to Australian mythology. Still it can be quite easy to forget that a small part of Australia lives in remote towns in the outback. How remote is best illustrated by a girl I met in Brisbane.
M’s mother had left her home in Yugoslavia very early due to a series of family circumstances and had found herself in Sydney. She had travelled north for work and met a crocodile wrangler up in Cairns and had married and had M. The union floundered and she moved further west to a town to manage a pub. By town I mean a population of perhaps 5000. M was growing up but her schooling did not suffer - as it turned out schooling was akin to the flying doctors in Australia. Meanwhile her mother had married the pub owner. M’s stories of this period were quite colorful – the joys and otherwise of a merged family, the toughness required of a pretty young woman managing a remote Queensland pub, M’s sharp observations on her singular childhood, the absent father and his misadventures, the inevitable snake and crocodile stories. Eventually her mother moved to Brisbane so M could go to college. M as it turned out is now a scientist with a PhD. She still lived with her mother and there was something incredibly sweet and feisty about her. I cannot tell her story as well as she tells it and she says her story is very simple compared to the rich tapestry of her mother’s life. I left Brisbane and then lost touch but her story stayed with me.
One of the students I met at the University, E, is a friend. Of all the students I met, he was the most interesting and bright – his mind seemed a tangled thicket of thoughts, which he smoothly unraveled and presented to you. You could spend hours talking to him and never be bored. He had some of the naiveté of the young and – at least to me – symbolized the persistence of sweetness and niceness, for a lack of a better word, in our species. His story was not as fantastic as M’s – his parents were true blue Aussies who had raised a brood. But the town where E had grown up was like M’s in being exceedingly small in terms of population and he had similarly had distance lessons. And he had plenty a tale of growing up in North Queensland with its extremes of drought and flooding. It was a real bush upbringing, rich material for the “my children are turning feral” faux complaint common in Queensland. And I was most amused by his account of the highlight of their lives – the monthly shopping trip to a nearby town that must have had about 1000 people.
I suppose I was drawn to these stories because they are the kind impossible to imagine even for a person who has lived in small towns in India. Sure the roads are tolerably good here, there is possibly a good enough internet connection in many towns and the like. Nevertheless the sheer remoteness of so many bush towns and the vast distances of the continent makes the whole experience of living there something quite different. But I think what most drew me to M and E is that the pursuit of education is entirely independent of the geographical circumstances of childhood. I meet many anxious parents trying to locate the best city schools, cramming the lives of their children (and their own) with as much activity as possible, obsessively coaching children for all kinds of exams. Obviously M and E’s parents were committed to their education and given that a school education is compulsory here, the State tries to facilitate schooling in remote places. Nevertheless, it was their own curiosity and intelligence (considerable in both cases though they appeared singularly content and did not possess a worldly wise ambition) that had brought M and E to their PhDs and their life in Brisbane. The germ of what we are is already present in childhood and it will flower as it must.
Australia is an urban society, nothing represents it better than acres of suburbia. But marginal suburbs are on the tip of the Australian wilderness and the bush is central to Australian mythology. Still it can be quite easy to forget that a small part of Australia lives in remote towns in the outback. How remote is best illustrated by a girl I met in Brisbane.
M’s mother had left her home in Yugoslavia very early due to a series of family circumstances and had found herself in Sydney. She had travelled north for work and met a crocodile wrangler up in Cairns and had married and had M. The union floundered and she moved further west to a town to manage a pub. By town I mean a population of perhaps 5000. M was growing up but her schooling did not suffer - as it turned out schooling was akin to the flying doctors in Australia. Meanwhile her mother had married the pub owner. M’s stories of this period were quite colorful – the joys and otherwise of a merged family, the toughness required of a pretty young woman managing a remote Queensland pub, M’s sharp observations on her singular childhood, the absent father and his misadventures, the inevitable snake and crocodile stories. Eventually her mother moved to Brisbane so M could go to college. M as it turned out is now a scientist with a PhD. She still lived with her mother and there was something incredibly sweet and feisty about her. I cannot tell her story as well as she tells it and she says her story is very simple compared to the rich tapestry of her mother’s life. I left Brisbane and then lost touch but her story stayed with me.
One of the students I met at the University, E, is a friend. Of all the students I met, he was the most interesting and bright – his mind seemed a tangled thicket of thoughts, which he smoothly unraveled and presented to you. You could spend hours talking to him and never be bored. He had some of the naiveté of the young and – at least to me – symbolized the persistence of sweetness and niceness, for a lack of a better word, in our species. His story was not as fantastic as M’s – his parents were true blue Aussies who had raised a brood. But the town where E had grown up was like M’s in being exceedingly small in terms of population and he had similarly had distance lessons. And he had plenty a tale of growing up in North Queensland with its extremes of drought and flooding. It was a real bush upbringing, rich material for the “my children are turning feral” faux complaint common in Queensland. And I was most amused by his account of the highlight of their lives – the monthly shopping trip to a nearby town that must have had about 1000 people.
I suppose I was drawn to these stories because they are the kind impossible to imagine even for a person who has lived in small towns in India. Sure the roads are tolerably good here, there is possibly a good enough internet connection in many towns and the like. Nevertheless the sheer remoteness of so many bush towns and the vast distances of the continent makes the whole experience of living there something quite different. But I think what most drew me to M and E is that the pursuit of education is entirely independent of the geographical circumstances of childhood. I meet many anxious parents trying to locate the best city schools, cramming the lives of their children (and their own) with as much activity as possible, obsessively coaching children for all kinds of exams. Obviously M and E’s parents were committed to their education and given that a school education is compulsory here, the State tries to facilitate schooling in remote places. Nevertheless, it was their own curiosity and intelligence (considerable in both cases though they appeared singularly content and did not possess a worldly wise ambition) that had brought M and E to their PhDs and their life in Brisbane. The germ of what we are is already present in childhood and it will flower as it must.
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