Assistant Principal (Secondary)

4WD on a Space Saver

A number of years ago, my wife and I took a number of teenagers to remote communities in the Kimberly region of Western Australia to do some volunteer work. We were based in a small town called Halls Creek and we ventured out from there to even smaller and more remote communities that were approximately hallway between Halls Creek and Alice Springs. 

To get to these communities we had to drive approximately four hours along the Tanami track, then turn right onto random tyre tracks that led out into the desert. Luckily, we were with a man who knew this area inside out. We drove on tracks through the desert for approximately two hours and arrived at one of the tiny remote towns called Balgo. 

We stayed there for a number of days, then ventured out another two hours further west, to a community called Mulan. When we were organising our trip with the car hire company, we explained the places we were going to drive to and explained that we needed a tough car that could make it. The company gave us a few new Mitsubishi Outlanders. These cars were very nice to drive on the highway, they were also okay to drive down the Tanami track; however, we started to feel that these weren’t the best cars to drive through a remote desert. 

We left Mulan and approximately an hour into our trip, the front tyre got a puncture. At this stage we had approximately three hours of driving through a desert track until we met the Tanami track and another four hours of driving up the Tanami track (which was a corrugated dirt road) until we arrived back at Halls Creek. When I pulled the spare tyre out, it was a space saver tyre. These tyres are much thinner and smaller than a normal tyre, they are only meant to get you from the side of the road to a service station. They can’t be driven over 80km/hr as they will likely break. This was not an ideal option to drive through a desert on tracks that were definitely not a road, with deep ruts and lots of potentially bogging sand. However, we had no other options: we had to continue to Balgo. 

We managed (with a lot of prayer) to make it to Balgo where we stayed for some extra time. We arrived at the local general store/petrol station/mechanic/health clinic (this is a place where people multitask). We showed the man at the shop our car and he laughed (quite a lot). He explained that we were idiotic to come out this far without a proper spare tyre. He graciously then took the tyre off the rim (in the old-school fashion of a tyre lever and hammer - as he didn’t have the machine). He then put a tube into our tyre, again using the tyre lever and hammer to put it back onto the rim, then used a bicycle hand pump to pump up our tyre.  

We managed to arrive back in Halls Creek with our new tube in the tyre and thankful that we’d managed to 4WD through the desert on a tyre that was definitely not made for desert roads. 

Interestingly, the thoughts we have about ourselves (the positive, negative, helpful or unhelpful) often don’t arise until stressors bring them out. Similarly, from the outside, the car we’d hired looked as though we could easily make it through the desert. It was shiny, new and only had 15,000 kms on the clock. However, what was on the inside was definitely not tough enough. In the design of it, they’d cut corners, to make it cheaper, to make more space - whatever the reason for the space saver tyre, the result was that it was not what we needed, but we didn’t know it initially, and didn’t find out until the stress levels rose. 

This week we had the privilege to farewell our Class of 2022. We had a lovely Final Assembly, followed by our version of a hippy farmers' market with food trucks at our farm, followed by the Valedictory Dinner. It will be interesting to see how our cohort performs under the stresses of their final exams. We hope and pray that the partnership between the families and Aitken College has built each child up so that when the stressors of life exert pressure on each young person, they’ll have the resilience and values to be able to stand up and move forward. As a College, we all wish that our Year 12s well in their exams and in starting their next chapter of life.

Mr Chris Graham

Assistant Principal (Secondary)