Vegetable Painkiller

Population:  30-ish

I’ve developed a collection of pottery shards that I find along the beach.  Some of them have very old fashioned patterns on them.  I’m convinced they come from old shipwrecks.  Maybe pirates!!!  There have been at least five documented shipwrecks on the shores of this island.

I was walking along the beach last week when I came across an intact glass bottle with the words “Davis Vegetable Painkiller” embossed on it.  What on earth is a vegetable painkiller!?  I looked it up on the internet.  It seems that from 1825 to around 1880 the Davis Pharmaceutical company made and distributed a mixture of opium and alcohol and called it a vegetable painkiller.  It was classic snake oil , but I’m sure it would have stopped the pain!!!  It was distributed by missionaries in the local area and my new little bottle must have been bobbing around in the ocean waves for at least 130 years.

Now I’m convinced that my pottery shards were the property of Blackbeard.

The disappearing mullet

Population 25-ish

You can see the bay from the school room window.  I was extremely surprised last week when we saw a huge commercial fishing boat pull up in the bay in front of the homestead.  This is a World Heritage listed Marine Park and protected waters with extreme and rigorously enforced sports fishing limits.  The fishing vessel threw out a large net and caught the entire school of mullet that used to jump out of the water in front of the homestead.

It seems that when they created the Marine Park, the aboriginal community retained traditional fishing rights.  I just didn’t expect them to turn up in a whopping great trawler and grab all our leaping mullet!!!

One enormous sand dune

Population 35-ish

One of the guests took the boys and I to the sand dunes today.  Massive, pure white dunes surround one of the bays.  The two boys jumps on snowboards and skied down them.  I thought they would break their necks, but they had obviously done this before.  I tried it myself.  It was a fun skid to the bottom but a long, steep scramble back to the top.

The guest had been coming to the island for 20 years and was telling me that the island had been one enormous stretch of sand.  He couldn’t believe how it had changed into scrubland in the last five years.  The sand is now held together by huge clumps of wiry grass and green bushes waist high.  There are some tiny trees that grow about knee high that looks like a miniature mature forest because of their gnarly, bonsai shape.   

I guess that’s what happens when you remove 25,000 sheep that have been eating everything green for the past 120 years.  The particularly wet summer has helped.  He pointed out one small tree (about six feet tall) amongst the grass and the scrubs “this used to be the marker for the road,” he said.  It used to be the only thing growing and the only way to plot your way across the sand.  Now the scrub is so thick the tree has almost disappeared and it’s almost impossible to drive off road.

Camping at the End of the World

Population:  35-ish non-zombies (except after a big night on the booze)

It seems a man named Harold Camping had predicted the end of the world to occur last night.  I bet you all thought I was crazy when I moved to a desert island in one of the most remote places on the planet.  You would all have been laughing on the other side of your zombie faces when I was safe and sound and surrounded by shark infested waters to protect me from the apocalypse.   It’s a well known fact that sharks love to feast on left-behind zombies.

Maybe I took the whole thing too literally.  Or maybe I mis-heard.  I thought we were meant to go “camping” for the Rapture.  So I grabbed the boys (I thought I might need minions later) and we took my new tent and went camping about 100 meters up the beach from the homestead.  We had the camp fire going and I threw a few cheesy potatoes in foil onto the fire. The boys’ grandmother was visiting and came to join us with a bottle of red wine.  One of the woofers brought us a big plate of fresh caught, fried calamari for dinner from the homestead kitchen.  We had a gorgeous sunset at exactly 6 o'clock and the world kept turning.  It was a lovely evening.

Not that we would have noticed the Apocalypse out here even if it had happened.

A day in the life of an island schoolroom

Population 40-ish

I've been back on the island for a couple of weeks and have slipped right back into the daily routine.  School starts at 9 o’clock but I usually get in at 8:30 to prepare the lessons for the day.  The boys pop their heads in, grab clothes from the chest of draw and ask “how many minutes to school time.”  Their toddler sister and the new puppy usually come to visit.  There is a kiddies gate to keep them both out during the day, but in the morning I let them wander in and out.

I have a musical triangle that I use as a school bell.  Strangely, the boys respond instantly to the “bell” but you can barely get them moving if you just find them and say “school time boys!”.  I let the toddler ring the bell even though she doesn’t quite have the hang of it.  She puts her hand all the way through and tries to bang the triangle with her forearm.

Lessons come straight out of the “School of Isolated and Distance Education” packs that are sent to us once a term.  The boys also do “Air Lessons” once a day for about 45 minutes.  These lessons used to be over CB radio.  Now it’s all on the internet, but they retained the “Air Lesson” label.

An “Air Lesson”  is conducted by the teacher at the School of the Air.  The school only has 30 students spread across the stations and tourist camps along the coast.  Each class has about 5 students who log onto the lesson.  There are buttons to press to put your hand up.  These are numbered so you can tell who put their hand up first.  Then an “applause” button and a “laugh” button that flash little clapping or laughing icons next to your name if you find something amusing.  There is usually a powerpoint type presentation and students are able to write on the screen with the mouse or point to things with their cursors.  Of course they are also able to talk using a headset with a microphone.

There is a constant battle for the “comfy chair”.  It’s my office chair and it has padding, goes up and down and twirls around.  So of course everyone wants it but little boys whose feet can’t touch the ground tend to fall off spectacularly when bending down to write on the little student work desks.  I find if I just stand behind them and keep poking them with my finger and repeating “I need my comfy chair“, they eventually get off.  It’s all part of the game.  I can’t stand up for two seconds without one of them nabbing it.

If we get all our lessons done before lunch, then we do art after lunch.  This doesn’t happen too often.  The lessons are pretty time consuming and the teachers expect the sets to be completed in two weeks.

The little puppy likes to come into the classroom whenever the kiddies gate is left open.  Unfortunately he hasn’t quite got control of his bladder yet, and whenever you grab his collar to lead him out of the room, he pees.  After cleaning up quite a bit of puppy pee, I now have a method of herding him out of the room.

School ends at 3:30 with reading time.  Sometime we let the toddler and the puppy in for reading time too but that usually dissolved into chaos.