Students come to Harvey to study farms and trades, not to focus their skills on English right? Think again.

Every year students in English prepare an assessment for the ABC teen voices competition Heywire. Heywire takes entries from secondary country students around Australia to give teenagers a voice, highlighting issues of interest to teens in rural and remote areas. The competition takes the form of a personal written memoir. After selection, the winners are filmed or recorded, and their stories are featured on ABC radio or viewed online or on ABC’s Landline.

While only a few can win the competition, this unit is a highlight for both Ms Browning and myself because we get to hear our students’ own stories. Many of them are personal, most beautiful, some profound. While some students write stories that are so poignant and personal that we would be careful before sharing them publicly, others, just as beautiful, are able to be shared. These are the stories we would like you as members of the College Community to read and enjoy. Over the coming weeks, we intend to share one or two stories per week.

Students have chosen to share their stories anonymously (as some are shy). All stories are unedited and are as they were submitted for assessment. (So, yes, there are some grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, but they are authentic). Please enjoy them as they are meant to be, the personal stories of our College students.

Today’s featured story is a lament for a disappearing farming lifestyle. It is amazing that the farming story unconsciously reinvented a stream-of-consciousness writing style used by the likes of James Joyce, Virginia Woolfe, and William Faulkner. Enjoy.

Dr Margaret Henderson

Country Living

I remember rising up out of bed to the sun beaming through my bedroom window and blinding my eyes, as my dog Rex runs past barking at the pink and grey galahs. The beautiful country air hits my face as I walk outside to put my boots on looking out at the wheat, barley and canola crops that go for miles into the horizon, listening to the crows and kookaburras singing and screeching. I loved the piece and quiet. Cold starting the old Hilux, and a big black cloud of soot puffing out the exhaust before going for a croppy and doing some cheeky skids that dad didn’t like. Spending time in the shearing sheds with the local shearing team who work every day in the dry heat, putting blood sweat and tears into shearing the farmers sheep to make a living and feed their families. Also waking up early on the holidays to go help dad with the crutching and mulesing run on cold dewy mornings where there is ice on the windscreen and the sheep are kicking up dust into the foggy yards and you can’t breathe or see because its so thick and the air is freezing cold. I really loved the hot dry summers and really freezing cold winters.

That was then, this is now.

The farm is gone, Pop has passed away, my dreams of continuing the legacy of this farm have been passed on to distant family. The feeling of knowing I’m not going to be like my pop and run my own farm hurts me. The family feud of four brothers and a sister has caused disagreements and rivalries to get what each want. Suddenly, we have separated from the community that our whole family was once apart of to now being all in separate places.

Going from the peace and quiet in the country to traffic and industrial noises in the city was a big change for me and my family, like finding new jobs, making new friends and affording the cost of living now days, that is through the roof. Small family farms are disappearing more and more often, and one family member is being left with everything, while others are forced out and are leaving the small towns. This leaves these small communities with no banks, no school students to have a functioning school, no weekend footy or netball where everyone goes to the pub afterwards and no local swimming pools that school students can go to with their mates after school and spend money in the town, all that is gone forever now until we make a change.

CHAPLAIN CHAT