Leaving behind home to get an education
That’s what it takes for young women to pursue an education at Worawa Aboriginal College — the first of only two Aboriginal-controlled boarding schools in Australia.
By photojournalist Jane Cowan
Sometimes the journey begins with a dusty bus trip in the middle of the night.
It means leaving behind literally everything familiar.
At 12 years old, the youngster might have been only sporadically in the education system.
Her family might be semi-nomadic, moving from place to place for ceremonial purposes. Other times she’s used to living with as many as 17 people to a house.
English might be her second — or third, or fourth — language.
If she is from Darwin in the Top End, she is likely to be more urbanised.
In Central Australia, or east Arnhem Land and the Torres Strait, far less so.
Almost certainly she has never before been on the great hulking plane she now has to board to fly south and begin a new life.
So far away
Down a sleepy road next to a cut flower farm and an alpaca stud, Worawa Aboriginal College sits on 55 hectares of bushy land just outside Healesville in Victoria’s Yarra Valley.
Among the gumtrees sit low-slung classrooms, a dining hall with a fulltime chef and five houses where students live on site. There is a gallery full of Indigenous art.
Basketball courts lit for night games and a grassy football field hint at the importance of sport.
It is the kind of place where class might finish early to shoot a few hoops and a ball of one kind or other seems to be perpetually under arm.
Tucked amongst the wineries and the sheep, Worawa is only 60 kilometres from Melbourne, but isolated in a way that gently mimics the girls’ home communities.
It is still a massive shock to the system.
“I really don’t think people understand the challenges that Aboriginal women face, coming from remote Aboriginal communities to a big city like Melbourne and for them to be able to cope,” says Worawa’s cultural advisor and ethno-botanist Lorraine Williams, who is also mum to one of the students.
“The transition of living in a place that’s so foreign to them that they wouldn’t know one plant — an animal, possibly.
“Just learning and being in a new environment, for that itself it’s just an amazing thing to do.
“I wouldn’t even go camping from Darwin to Katherine, in grade seven. I wouldn’t leave my mother’s side. And these girls are actually leaving their communities.
“It’s a whole different lifestyle. I mean, coming down to Melbourne and seeing all the people down here — we’ve got more trees up in the Northern Territory than we do people.
“And I look around and I say, ‘wow’. It just blows my mind how many people are actually down here — as an adult.
“These girls are having to do that when they’re 11 and 12, 13 years old. That’s a huge change for them. And they seem to cope really well.”
School nurse Annie Handley runs Worawa’s boarding program, which sees the girls conform to a daily routine that includes household chores.
“The general lifestyle of these children at home, they have a very free and easy life where they get up when they want to, eat when they want to and go to bed if they please,” she says.
“You’re putting them into this structured environment where number one, you have to wear shoes to school. Number two, you’ve got to have a uniform on.
“Meal times are at these times and lights out at nine o’clock. So that’s a huge adjustment for them and it amazes me actually that they do adapt, and they do almost thrive on being contained.”
Describing herself as a kind of mum to everyone, Ms Handley interacts with the girls on the most intimate level.
She knows that when students come back after the holidays they are likely to have skin infections and maybe head lice from overcrowded living conditions at home.
That if they are from the Top End, to look for tropical ulcers.
If they are from the Central Australian desert, trachoma.
That their renal function might be affected by the consumption of highly mineralised water from springs and wells tapping the Great Artesian Basin.
Many, many obstacles have been overcome just for a girl to walk through the gates.
Once they make it here, a whole new world opens up.
“One of the things that happens is, if you go to school in Alice Springs, you will have a lot of kin there who will then sort of go: ‘What are you doing in school? You should be down here playing footy,’” Ms Handley says.
“And the parents don’t want that sort of humbugging.
“They want them to be away from that, so they can be their own person and make decisions about what sort of education they want.”
Walking in two worlds
A common pastime for some of Worawa’s students who have come from the desert is to sit drawing in the sand.
In one hand is a stick. In the other, a smartphone.
As young Aboriginal women in modern-day Australia, these girls occupy a complex space.
The contradictions are threaded through their days.
They will still shy away from a camera, uttering the word “shame”.
But photos plaster the walls beside their bunks and they love a selfie as much as the next teenage girl.
Facebook is a common means of communicating with those back home.
This is the magic of Worawa, where traditional languages are encouraged and culture is taught alongside English and life skills.
In one class, the students sort scenarios into three categories: “dealbreaker”, “deal with it” or “it depends”.
The hypotheticals range from “your partner arrives late to pick you up” to “your partner posts mean things about you on social media” and “your partner refuses to wear protection”.
This goes to the heart of what Worawa is about — equipping young Aboriginal women with the skills and the confidence to succeed in contemporary mainstream society and lead in their own communities.
A mother’s hope
Mum Lorraine Williams’ eyes sparkle as she thinks of what will become of these young women.
She has seen her daughter change through the experiences opened up by Worawa.
The first year Stephanie was here, she ended up over in Hawaii, representing the school at the World Indigenous Peoples Conference on Education.
In the three years since, she has captained sporting teams and changed her entire outlook.
“It actually took for her, a Territory girl, to come down to Melbourne to be really empowered as an Aboriginal woman,” Ms Williams says.
“She was able to come down here and just grow as an Aboriginal woman.
“To be empowered, to understand what her rights are, to speak up loud, to be encouraged.
“To also play sport, to be a strong Aboriginal woman. It’s been an amazing experience for her and I’ve seen her grow. And grow into something really beautiful.”
She says her daughter has had more cultural teachings at Worawa than she would have received in a mainstream school in Darwin.
“She doesn’t want to come back to the Territory, she wants to stay down here,” Ms Williams says.
“Which is good for me because it’s that stepping stone of then being able to think about what university you want to go to.
“She’s already planned it out almost … ‘I won’t be coming back until I finish university’.
“And that’s something you want to hear as a parent. It’s so encouraging just to hear those words: ‘Yes, I’m going to go on.’”
Even a recent bout of sickness served as inspiration, and had Stephanie thinking about going into nursing.
“She was sitting at the hospital, very sick, going: ‘Maybe I might do nursing, I like the thought of nursing. I think I could be a nurse,’” Ms Williams says.
“Just for her to be thinking through, you know: ‘What do I do after school?’ And that’s all happening because it’s been encouraged through Worawa.”
Where the heart is
The most prized time in the daily timetable is “phone time”.
After the last class of the day, the girls are allowed to access their phones and everyone is glued to the screens, communicating with loved ones at home either via Facebook or with voice calls.
Homesickness is one of the hardest things about going to school here.
The girls’ hearts are in their communities and many return home after graduating.
“There’s not a lot of employment in Aboriginal communities,” Ms Handley says.
“But even if they can’t be employed, they can still be great leaders in the community and force change.
“I think giving them the leadership skills and the language to be able to do that without losing their culture is really, really important.”
Worawa only offers years seven to 10, but girls can then receive scholarships to go on to complete their education at other boarding schools, and proceed to TAFE or university.
“Nearly everyone that comes through here has a talent that you could package and say: ‘You can be the top of your game,’” Ms Handley says.
“Whether it’s painting and art work, dance and music, caring for the environment or sport.
“But you could also say: ‘The thing that will let you down is if you don’t focus.’”
‘Hopefully we’ll get a PM out of these girls’
Rigour and responsibility are key tenets of the Worawa philosophy, alongside the values of respect and relationship.
Mum Lorraine Williams perhaps articulates it best.
“My hope for these girls is for them to go back to their communities and be strong Aboriginal women, to know the difference between right and wrong,” she says.
“To know that their culture is something very precious and something that should be taught and handed down to their grandchildren and their great grandchildren.
“To be able to keep their language strong. But most importantly, with the education they have, is to be able to make their communities better places.
“That’s what I really want for them — for them to be good people.
“Because if they don’t stop now the cycle of domestic violence, or any type of violence in the community, it’s just going to keep on going and it’s going to make our communities really unsafe places. So, it’s up to these young women here.”
Fitting, then, that the school emblem is the wedge-tailed eagle, chosen by founder Hyllus Maris not only for its totemic significance but as a symbol of strength and leadership.
Wings are being spread, nests left.
Ms Williams intends to watch these young women soar.
“They’re going to be the doctors, they’re going to be the lawyers,” she smiles.
“They’re going to be the people actually managing and running their communities.
“Hopefully we’ll get a prime minister out of all these girls, too.”
