It may be bleak, cold and even snowing in Melbourne, but up in Charleville the weather is just gorgeous, so we can walk and ride around in the glorious sunshine in short sleeves every day, though it does get pretty chilly at night.
We've settled in to our roles here in Charleville. Mandy is the specialist for children with special needs at the School of Distance Education, which we grew up knowing as the School of the Air. It's generally accepted as the largest classroom in the world, covering over 420,000 sq kms, though they also have children overseas in places like Berlin and Dubai. To put that into relative terms, it covers an area larger than Great Britain, Ireland, Belgium and the Netherlands combined. Her role has a few parts to it. She does some on-air lessons with children who have enough competency to handle them; she supports their other teachers with ideas for suitable activities, behaviour strategies, and sometimes just encouragement to not take behaviour personally; she liases with parents about support services that are available (though getting parents to use them seems surprisingly hard); and prepares submissions for financial and other assistance in conjunction with the other visiting specialist staff (OTs, psychologists etc). On Tuesday's she books out a guvvy car and drives to Augathella Primary which is about 80km down the road, and works with a couple of children there. It's a two teacher school with no specialists, and the principal has a full time teaching load with 27 kids from grade 3 - 7, as well as all the principal's duties and paperwork, so they can do with all of the help they can get. She certainly enjoys the contact with real children, and the drive is rather nice too.
We've moved into a guvvy house as they are known - well actually a guvvy 2 bedroom duplex. It's one of those toss up situations. We've got no furniture, so it's very empty and noisy, but it's still much, much cheaper to move into an education department subsidised unit and buy a fridge, washing machine, microwave, bed, table and chairs (and probably give them away at the end) than it is to pay to stay in our caravan at the local caravan park. The only problem is that some of the stuff that we have bought still has to be delivered after 4 weeks. We tried to do the right thing and buy from the local shops to support the town, but in retrospect the best course of action is to buy it on the internet and have it delivered from Brisbane - all the Brisbane stuff seems to arrive in 3 or 4 days. Our caravan is parked on the nature strip, but once all of our appliances arrive and we no longer have to go out to the caravan to cook, we'll try and store it somewhere.
Charleville is an interesting town. It's on the main highway and train line from Brisbane to Darwin. Cobb and Co had their headquarters here, and the first Qantas flight took off from Charleville. However, that was all a long time back. Now it's definitely a service town. If you can excuse a few figures, according to the last census there are about 3700 people in the town with 5% unemployment, 23% children and 13% retired. A whopping 34% of the entire population works on providing government-paid services to the town and district - health, education, and other support organisations. Or to put it another way, over 70% of the adults in the town or district are paid a wage or benefit by the government.
A walk around the town turned up the following agencies and services - and we're pretty sure we haven't go them all:
- South West Youth Services
- Charleville and Western Areas Aboriginal and Torres Straight Islander Community Health
- Family and Child Connect
- Indigenous Community Links
- Queensland Community Health Services
- Charleville and District Community Support Association
- Bluecare
- Remote Area Family Services
- Frontier Services
- Community Respite Centre
- Charleville Community Care
- Healthy Aging
- Rural Financial Counselling Service
- Partners In Recovery
- Child Safety Service Centre
- Centrelink
- Lifeline Counselling
- State Emergency Service
- Aussie Helpers
Of course, there is a huge turnover within the 34% who provide government services, most of whom come out here to get their first job, and this leads to a 35% rental rate in town, because no one is here long enough to buy. More than 1 in every 4 houses is owned by the government to entice people like us to come all the way out here.
Perversely despite all of these services, there's not a whole lot going on in the town. Most of the support and community groups are government funded, so tend to be looked on as 'work', rather than community groups. Apart from sport (rugby, netball and golf), there's not a whole lot to get involved in unless you want to pay, and this has tripped Greg up somewhat. What he hadn't really factored into his thoughts was, that in order to volunteer in the community, there has to be groups or organisations in the community doing things to volunteer for. Some of the government agencies are quite happy for you to lend a hand to the paid workers, but that isn't quite the same, and most of the rest want long term commitment. At the moment the most advertised position vacant in town is the bingo caller at the Healthy Aging centre. That'll get Greg out of bed on Tuesdays I'm sure.
The town isn't dying, but it's not exactly thriving. They are down to 2 pubs, an IGA supermarket, and two bakeries - one of which doesn't actually bake bread and is for sale. Even the Country Target has closed. Imagine that - everybody in town now has to travel for 4 hours for the privilege of buying their clothes at Country Target, otherwise you have the choice of Wranglers or Wranglers.
Which leads us to the retoric question of the month. Just why does the government collect stats on religious affiliation as part of the census? It bears no relationship to anything practical. For example, we visited the Anglican Church in Charleville last Sunday. According to the last census, there should have been over 1100 rather confused adults trying to find the correct page in the Book of Common Prayer. Instead we found just 4 tourists and 8 locals, all of them older than us (which is becoming a more and more sobering comparison). Probably 1000 of the locals put down Anglican on the census in the expectation that this allegiance would guarantee them a proper funeral, but we've got news for them. There's not even an Anglican priest based in the town. Nor do the dozen people down at the Presbyterian Church have one either. However, the Prezzys do have one advantage. They leave the urn on after the service, and just as the dozen faithful are heading home, the local tourist operator's bus pulls up, and the tour group gets out to demolish the last of the tim tams.
The highlights for the town in the next month are the annual Charleville Races, and the South West Masters Games, which are not turning out to be the big hit they were hoping. The notes on their website say they need more tennis players - only two players in the over 60s, they need more squash players - there's one coming from Melbourne and she needs competition, more cycling nominations - they can't do it with only one person, and more swimmers - though the pool is closed for Winter and everybody is wearing coats around town. On the other hand, the over 50s roo shooting event is over subscribed. It's actually rumoured that in the last Masters Games, two silkworms were caught racing - it ended in a tie.
If you'd like to see some more photos, you can go to these links:
School of Distance Education http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/gregd999/16/1438819200/tpod.html
Our House http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/gregd999/16/1438905600/tpod.html
Around Charleville http://www.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/gregd999/16/1438166121/tpod.html
Till next month - take care and stay well.
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