Heading to the Island

Tomorrow I finally start my journey to the Island.  I’ve seen photos, I’m met the whole extended family, but setting foot on the island for the first time is where the whole adventure really begins.

The grandfather was a wealthy supermarket mogul who bought the island in 1969.  For the next twenty-five years, the whole 620 square kilometer island (10 times the size of Manhattan Island) was used as a private family retreat.  The island had been leased for sheep farming for nearly 100 years but the family went about eradicating the sheep and all non-native species in order to restore the natural eco-system.  They turned the island over to the government in 2005 to create a National Park, but retained several hundred acres of freehold property around the homestead and the most spectacular of the beaches.  The grandchildren now live there and run the old homestead and shearing quarters as an eco-tourism lodge.  It is the only dwelling on the Island and the little family of 5 are the only permanent residents.

My arrival will bring the population of the Island to a grand total of six.  Mother, father, three children and the governess.  As soon as tourist season hits in March, there will be four staff (usually foreign backpackers on a big Australian adventure) and up to 20 guests (mostly avid fisherman).

My job is to supervise the classroom for the two boys.  Because they are so remote, the boys attend “School of the Air” broadcast from a school in a town about 4 hours away.  School of the Air used to be conducted on CB radio to educate the isolated children of the Outback.  Lessons are now on the internet and governesses are hired to go through the lessons with the children, make sure all the course work is completed correctly, and run the school room with some discipline.

I love the term “governess”.  I’m not sure if I’ll be more Mary Poppins, Anna from “the King and I“, or Maria from “the Sound of Music”.  Maybe I’ll be the more modern version.  I’ll be the governess with the magic Ipad and the Cancer Council approved sun umbrella.

I’ve already met the boys - William is 7 years old and Oliver is 5.  They are exactly what you would expect from young boys who have spent their whole lives running around the beaches of their own desert island.  They are a cross between Robinson Crusoe and Crocodile Dundee - carefree, barefooted, self reliant, laid-back but polite and well mannered.  The type of boys that you know, if you can get them talking, will have wild stories to tell of sharks and snakes and spiders and feral cats.  And it will all come naturally to them because this is the only life they have ever known.

Better get my bags packed!!!