Bushfire and Athletics

I woke up the other morning to an eerie looking sight - the town seemed to be covered by fog, which is just a little unusual in the tropics. However my nose and my burning eyes soon convinced me that it was not fog at all, but smoke from a mearby bushfire.



It got progressively worse over the next two hours, and by 8:15am it lloked like we would have to cancel the athletics carnival we had planned for that morning. However a breeze blew up, and by 9am it had cleared enough for us to get started.





That night the fire was still going, and the glow was lighting up the sky long after the sun had set.


I woke up before sunrise the next morning and went out to see if I could get some decent shots of the sunrise. None of them turned out as anything spectacular, but whilst I was there I was struck by the number of camp dogs around. There are always dogs roaming the streets in many Aboriginal communities, but they were really out in force this morning. There were eight or so lazing around just outside my fence, and I saw two other packs just as big roaming in the distance.

Visit to Manmoyi

Gunbalanya, where I live, has about 880 people - 800 of them local indigenous people and about 80 from elsewhere. It has three homeland centres, which are sub-communities of less than 100 people located anything up to 100km away from the township.


The school that I work at has three-sub schools, called outstations, located in the homelands. The one I visted this week is called Manmoyi. It is about 100km East of Gunbalanya, which takes about 45 minutes in the single engined 4-seater that we use.

There were about 20 students there this week, ranging in age from pre-school all the way to year 11. There are normally more but a large group of the older girls had come into the main town for the week.

The school consists of two classrooms, each with a small storeroom/office attached that face each other across a central open area. The whole thing sits under a single large roof so that the open area creates a breeze way where the kids can play in most weather.

The classrooms are very simple - bare concrete floors, a few chairs and desks, ceiling fans and louevered windows but no air conditioning. It is not too bad in the mornings, but gets fairly uncomfortable by the middle of the day.

There is a sink in the breezeway where the kids can get water but is not cooled at all and doesn't do much to refresh you. Despite all of this the kids are terrific, keen to be there and have a really positive attitude. I took the secondary age students for the two days that I was there whilst the regular teacher took the primary kids and I really enjoyed it.

The school provides breakfast, morning tea and lunch for the kids. School starts at 8:00am but when I was there the kids started arriving for breakfast at 6:25am!

The facilities that the visitng teacher gets a fairly spartan. He has a collapsible camp stretcher to sleep on, a fridge and a stove. The room has a ceiling fan but no airconditioning. Aircon may seem like a luxury to people from southern states, but trying to do without it is virtually unheard of in the tropics.