Schooling

Blue.....again! Much to Erin's
disgust but good for me - no colour
changes.  4 schools - all blue.

Both the girls have started school here in Katherine and it is amazing how different the experience can be despite the education system now being under the national curriculum criteria.  For the last two years for Erin and one year for Becca, they have been attending a combined kindy, primary and high school which was one of the biggest in regional Western Australia.  This was one of only two schools in the Kununurra district, the other being St Josephs primary school which was a self funded private school.  There were close to 1000 students at Kununurra District High School and despite that huge number, the school ran very well with separate faculty staff for the two levels of primary and high school.  The percentage of indigenous students in Kununurra was about 40% and there were programs in place to encourage attendance of those indigenous students.  If kids didn't live in town, they would be picked up and dropped home by bus.  Save the Children charity would also run a bus which would pick indigenous kids up in town so they would at least get to school.
Since moving to Katherine, our choice of schools has increased to five primary and one high school.  Of those primary schools, only one is private also being called St Josephs.  Katherine is divided into regions or suburbs if you like, those being Katherine north, south and east with the majority of those primary schools, and the high school, being in Katherine east.  We have settled in Katherine north and so the girls are going to Clyde Fenton Primary School named after the first man to become a flying doctor in the NT.  Thankfully again we are within walking distance to school which is only a couple of blocks from Knotts Crossing Resort.  The school has only 270 students and is a major change from a school with 1000 students. 
During morning assembly the entire school fits into a small undercover area and after school, the grounds are deserted within minutes after the bell goes.  In Kununurra it was chaos for at least 20 minutes after the siren with kids, cars and bikes going everywhere.  The design of the school classrooms is open space simply because the school was built in the 70's when that style of teaching was encouraged.  The class structure is peculiar with all the classes being split over two year levels.  There are a number of 1/2 classes, 3/4 classes and 5/6 classes but no single class levels.  The procedures within the school are quite similar to those in Ingham North Queensland when we were there and the starting and finishing times are slightly different to Kununurra.  School starts with an assembly at 8.15am and classes finish at 2.45pm which is about 30 minutes longer than Kununurra.  The school has a biweekly all school assembly with a smaller year level assembly on the opposing Friday which is the same as Kununurra.  The rewards system is similar with 'thumbs up' cards being handed out for positive behaviour and good choices which is similar to the 'faction card' system in Kununurra.  Attendance and reading awards are also distributed at the assemblies as they were in Kununurra.  I attended the all school assembly last week and saw a very different award being handed out called the honours merit award.  Kids at CFS collect the 'thumbs up' cards and when they have ten, they receive a merit award.  Once they have achieved 100 'thumbs up' cards equating to 10 merit awards they receive the honours award.  The child sits at the front of the assembly on a chair with a robe over their shoulder.  In the lead up to their award they answer some questions asked by the deputy principal about personal likes, dislikes and achievements which are read out during the ceremony.  Then friends of the award recipient are asked to come up and tell the school some positive comments about their friend.  Then the parents and siblings, who stand behind their child while they receive the award, are also asked to contribute some comments about their child/brother/sister.  Last weeks award winners sister decided to tell the school that her brother liked to sing in the shower.........very embarrassing!  I'm pretty sure that Steve and I will never have to do that as Erin would do anything not to be put up in front of the school like that.  Becca would be full of embarrassing feedback about her older sister.
The girls have again been placed in sporting colours to represent the school which is something all the schools have done.  The names for these sports teams however, is different across the schools the girls have attended.  In Ingham the sports teams were named after famous explorers of the area, Erin being in the blue team called Dalrymple.  The red team was Scott and the yellow team was Hunter.  In Kununurra, the sports teams (or factions as they were called) were named after plants of the area.  Erin and Becca were in the red team called Poinciana, while there was green called boab and white called Whitegum.  Many families complained in Kununurra about having the boring colour of white in a sporting team.  The blue sports team was named Ord after the Ord River.  Here in Katherine, the sports teams are named after birds of the area.  Erin and Becca are in the green team called Jabiru, while there is blue called Kingfisher, yellow called Brolga and an orange team called Pelican.  I've never seen orange in sports colours before but the kids seem to love wearing them.   In fact many of the kids wear their sports colours more often than the blue school uniform as they love the colours.
The sirens in each school that Erin has attended have been markedly different.  In Mapleton, the bell was actually a bell which was rung by older students during the day.  Every morning and afternoon the bell would be rung to let students know what time it was whether it be recess, lunch or hometime.  In Ingham the siren sounded like a horn at a football match.  In Kununurra, the siren sounded like an air-raid siren as those people in WW2 would have heard.  It was very harsh and used to scare Becca when we would go and pick Erin up from school before she started herself.   The siren at school here in Katherine is the 'bing bong bong bong' type like one hears in airports before an announcement is made.  I'm still waiting for the announcement when I hear that sound.  Clyde Fenton Primary has a PA system which can be heard all over the school grounds and in the classrooms so any announcements from the front office are relayed to everyone at once.  It is a bit distracting in class though.  The school has an open class policy whereby parents can sit in on classes and watch their kids performances in class.  I have already sat in on a class where Erin had to read in front of her class for marks.  She did very well.
Meeting parents in school has always been achievable for me because many parents will, at some stage, pick up or drop off their kids at school.  I am finding, however, that Katherine is different especially with Erin's friends because most of her age group now walk themselves to and from class to parents' waiting in cars.  Even Becca's class in which parents have to physically pick them up are not producing many opportunities for meeting parents as many of the littlies catch the bus to either another suburb in town or to rural areas.  I have met a couple of parents through Erin's friendships at school so that might have to be the case with Becca although Becca's age group don't seem to bug for playovers and are just happy to catch up at school.  We'll see.
Schools in Katherine, Ingham and Mapleton all have inter school swimming programs which are state subsidised and run as part of the school curriculum in terms 1 and 4 during the wet/hot season.  Kununurra was the only school not to run such a program which was a huge omission on the states' part.  Queensland and the NT governments realise and understand that children residing in these states experience almost year round warm weather and so the need for a swimming program is paramount.   I did feel that in Western Australia, such programs were omitted because the southern part of the state influenced the bulk of the decisions and Perth doesn't experience year round warm weather.  I felt that the northern districts were somewhat overlooked in this regard which is a pity.  WA is the only state where the climate stretches from temperate to tropical but sadly the temperate seems to dominate the decision making and the tropical part of the state, which is more affiliated with NT and North Queensland misses out on vital programs such as this.
Lunchtime at school in these northern tropical regions is always a balancing act between giving your kids a healthy lunch and not giving them food poisoning.  Keeping lunches cool has always been a challenge for me where-ever we have lived and Katherine is no different although I have had to change my packing strategy.  I always have an ample supply of ice bricks for the girls' lunchboxes and freeze yoghurts so that they are still cool and edible once lunch or recess comes around.  Due to some weird procedure during the girls' upbringing for which I must be totally responsible, neither of them like a whole piece of fruit but prefer it cut up......as I said, that must be my fault somewhere along their upbringing.  Anyway, as a result, the girls get an orange, apple or carrot cut up and I usually place it in a Tupperware container.  Fruit such as pineapple and strawberries have always been stored in plastic containers that are easy to use at recess or lunch.  In Katherine however, the lunchtime or fruit time procedure is such that the kids eat outside and cannot gain access to the classroom or their bags to put plastic containers back in lunchboxes.  I have had to pack cut up fruit into glad wrap and alfoil so that this can be thrown away by the girls while they are out in the school yard.  I suppose the good thing is that their lunchboxes come home empty so there are no containers to wash up however lunch items that are better kept in containers are now packed in wrap.  The classrooms at Clyde Fenton School do have fridges specifically for lunchboxes which is a real bonus whereas Kununurra's classrooms relied on the airconditioning to keep lunchboxes cool which didn't always work.  Erin would quite often come home and say that her lunch had been less than cool.  Ingham and Mapleton had no airconditioning where the kids school bags were kept and no fridges for lunchboxes so I'm surprised that Erin survived her time there without food poisoning.  In Mapleton's defence, the temperature in the hinterland was nearly always much cooler with the exception of some extremely hot days which couldn't have been that hot because I always walked to school pushing Becca in the pram to pick Erin up.
Anyway this blog has not been a whinge on my part but just a self reminder that nothing is set in stone as far as daily routines go and that there is always need for a rethink when one shifts to somewhere different.  Something as simple as school lunch and recess can require some rearranging of routines because each school does it differently.  In some respects though, the similarities make it easy when one starts somewhere different.  As our family was being shown around Clyde Fenton School a few weeks back and the school routine was being explained, at least I could think.....'yes that is similar to here or there' or if not, then we had something to work on and become familiar with.  The ongoing learning curve continues.

Wildlife

One might say that there would not be a lot of difference between the wildlife around us in Katherine as compared to Kununurra but there are subtle differences which we are noticing about the animals themselves and people's reactions to them.  The cane toad, which is just as much of a pest here as across the border in WA does stir different reactions in the community.  Cane toads have been in the NT since the mid 80's and people are less reactive to them here in Katherine although there are still programs in place to control them.  They have become more of a sport as locals dream up new ways of eradicating them although welfare groups are quick to deter such behaviour.  In WA however, there was almost panic about cane toads being in Kununurra.  In some respects it was a natural reaction as their migration across the border was something that WA had been trying hard to prevent and so their appearance in Kununurra was seen as a disaster.  There are signs up everywhere in WA for travellers to keep watch for 'stow away' cane toads in their vans or vehicles.  In reality, the numbers of cane toads that have crossed the border via vehicles is minimal compared to those that have just migrated under their own steam over that invisible line in the bush.  As a newcomer to the state, cane toads have instilled a totally different reaction in the community of Kununurra as compared to Katherine's more low key reaction due to the cane toads long term habitation of NT. 
Size was another interesting factor.  Some toads we have seen around our caravan park have been of a size which we rarely saw in Kununurra.  There are some monstrous examples of 'dinner plate' sized toads but the numbers of toads visible around the area are less than what we saw in Kununurra.  At night, if we walked around the caravan park in Kununurra, toads would be moving around and be quite visible but smaller in size.  In Katherine we see less toads in general but their sizes are markedly bigger.

Little frog on a 2kg gas bottle

Our toilet frog on a towel rail

The effects of cane toads on another amphibian of the Top End are also different.  Green tree frog sightings around us here in Katherine are greater than in Kununurra.  During our first wet season in WA, we saw green tree frogs around our site and over at the toilet block but once the cane toads had established themselves, the green tree frogs virtually disappeared.  They were still around but their numbers seemed much less than the previous year.  Here in Katherine it is almost as if the cycle of frogs versus toads over 30 years has come full circle and they now cohabit without one or the other being affected.  Our ensuite building has a regular green tree frog resident sitting on our towel rail or on the bench and they frequent our undercover gazebo at night catching the bugs which are attracted to our lighting.  When it rains, a male GTF calls to anyone who's listening from on top of our annex and makes a raucous noise.  Many people of the Top End consider GTF's a pest themselves because they clog up drainpipes and toilets and poop everywhere.  This is true of the little green critters but as a relative newcomer to life in the tropics, I still like having them around.

Our gazebo insect catcher

The next little critter to have impacted on our lives again is the ant.  In Kununurra, our site under three massive trees meant that it was inevitable that ants were going to be around.  We were most affected by green ants which built huge nests in the tree branches from dead leaves and their own sticky concoction of glue.  They eventually used our caravan as an ant highway travelling from one tree to another along the roof, ropes, tarps and whatever else was available.  There were times when I would go out to hang washing on the line only to be swarmed by them on the ground as they searched for new leaves to add to their nests.  One time Steve put and empty dog food tin in the outside rubbish bag we had hanging in the gazebo.  By the next morning we had been overrun by green ants which had swarmed our entire bbq area seeking out the meaty treat in a tin.  It took days for them to finally get the message that there was no food available anymore during which time we could barely use our cooking area due to the swarm.  We had been warned about the dreaded green ant and it's nasty bite but in all honesty, it wasn't as bad as it was portrayed.  The green ants we cohabitated with didn't have a sting but instead would bite and then squirt formic acid from its abdomen into the bite which would cause some discomfort but not the excruciating pain that everyone talked about.  These ants however, would rarely come into the van.   They were not ants that sought human food as their main diet was other insects and grubs. 
Here in Katherine however, we have discovered a new ant to cohabit with.  Ginger ants (or the tropical fire ant) are tiny little brown ants which have become quite hard to live with since we arrived on our site.  Whenever we have stayed in the cabins at Knotts Crossing in the past, there have been signs placed in the cabins asking guests to put all food in the fridge or in airtight containers to prevent ginger ants contaminating food.  Now I understand what they meant.  My pantry has become a little treasure trove for these annoying pests.  In the past, I have put any half opened packets into a sealable glad bag to stop ants and keep the food reasonably fresh.  Potato chips, biscuits, coconut and sugar products kept fairly well in these bags until I had room in my containers.  I have only a limited amount of space for plastic containers to hold food so sometimes the bags were the best alternative.  Ginger ants are the 'houdinis' of the ant world and have managed to breach my sealed bags and spoil the food inside.   Now I will have to use airtight containers to store items I never really had to separate before.  This means that the jigsaw puzzle that is my pantry will go to a whole new level.
I had another rather unpleasant experience recently with ginger ants which I wasn't expecting.  I grabbed my towel after a shower and started to dry off before feeling like acid was burning my skin.  When I looked in the mirror, I was covered in ginger ants which were on my towel.  They had been attracted to something on my towel and were lurking in the pile so I didn't see them.  I brushed them off quickly but then came up in huge lumps where they had bitten me.  My neck, face and under my arms were red, itchy lumps within minutes and today I am covered with noticeable bites.  Not only is this annoying little ant a human food scavenger but it seems to have a nasty bite which causes a severe reaction.  I can only imagine that there must have been something sweet like toothpaste on my towel which attracted them but the experience was not nice.  I'm just grateful that they weren't on the girls towels when they used them after showering because it would have been nasty for them.  So it has become apparent to me that size definitely does not mean savagery in the ant world.  Small and mighty seems to be more appropriate in this case with the tiny ginger ant being far more nasty in bite and habits than the green ant.  It's going to be a continual war with these little critters I'm sure until we can find some way to live together without them annoying me or causing harm.

Mean green prickly critter

Recently, Becca was investigating another little critter when she received a nasty and painful sting.  There is a little grub or maybe a caterpillar which can be found around our site with all the armoury to demonstrate danger but also the stinging punch to back it up.  In nature, caterpillars tend to look fierce and threatening to keep predators away but in reality it's just a bluff.  Not this little green critter though.  It looks nasty and it feels nasty too.  Becca and I have come up in swollen whelts where this critter has touched our skin and caused a painful sting as well.

Not a grasshopper but a large dive
bomber nonetheless

Insect life here seems to take on either a miniature form or gigantic proportions.  Grasshoppers which congregate under the gazebo at night are huge.  Big enough to knock one senseless if they come your way as they do so frequently while I'm sitting outside at night.  I must have a target on me somewhere.  Brindle takes great pleasure in trying to chase one down while Karki regularly makes a meal of one.  It's far more acceptable finding a half eaten grasshopper on the annex doorstep as opposed to geckoes which have been unfortunately preyed on by our little tiger cat. 
Speaking of reptiles, we have not seen many lizards at all since settling here but Steve did come across an 8 foot brown snake one night just outside the park's boundary fence while walking the dog.  It had a girth of about 10 cm in diameter and it wasn't a python.  It was laying across the grass path outside the fence in the pitch darkness.  It was lucky that Steve was carrying a torch so he skirted around the large critter especially making sure that the dog didn't attempt to investigate. The snake wasn't interested in moving either.  Steve said that Brindle didn't appear to be overly interested in it which was lucky.  This experience just demonstrates that snakes are likely to be out at night in the tropics because it is still warm enough for them to be active.
The birdlife doesn't seem to be as prolific around our site in Katherine but then we were living near a national park in Kununurra so that's a no brainer really.  We are lucky enough though to have a nice outlook again from our site in Katherine.  Over the back fence of the caravan park is a massive open space which was once Katherine's airstrip.  From 1945 to 1975 air traffic landed behind our site and the once busy terminal is now the site of the towns' aviation museum.  All air traffic shifted to Tindal Air Force base when that was established in the 70's.  Having a great open space behind us allows us the opportunity to watch a different bird which we regularly heard but seldom saw in Kununurra.  The rainbird or pheasant coucal flits around in the long grass during the morning and evenings calling the rain.  It isn't a very good flyer because it has a very long tail but can fly in short bursts between low trees and shrubs.  It is reputed to bring rain when it calls which sometimes feels true but it's not consistent.  Little finches and wrens perch in the boundary fence wire at the back of our site and parrots frequent the trees around the caravan park.  The greater bowerbird also can be seen and heard around the park although I haven't found a bower yet.  I think it would probably be on the ground of the open space over the fence.  I did however find a very interestingly placed bower on a recent drive out to Edith Falls national park where a bowerbird had built his bower under a picnic bench.

A clever Edith Falls NP
bowerbird

No shortage of macropods

Having such a lot of open land behind us attracts wallabies by the dozens.  In the evenings they are everywhere around the old airstrip and graze during the night on the grass that surrounds the caravan park.  I wouldn't know what they are doing in the morning as I am up before the sun and bleary eyed for at least an hour by which time the wallabies would be all in the shade.  I know that they graze close to the boundary fence behind us because while I was sitting outside one night reading I heard the thump, thumping sound of them hopping nearby although it was too dark to see anything.
Perhaps our most fascinating encounter with wildlife since arriving in Katherine has been with fireflies.  We took the dog for a walk one Friday night after dark and did a circuit down the airstrip and across Gorge road then behind the cemetery and hospital.  There was no lighting on this path and the lightning was the only light flashing around us from a distant storm.  As we walked along I noticed what looked like escaping embers from a fire.  Our walking along the path was disturbing the fireflies and sending them flying into the air and glowing as they went.  Neither myself or the girls had ever seen them before and it was fantastic to watch these little glows of light flitting around us as we walked.  Becca decided that they were little 'Tinkerbells' flying around us.  Again we have experienced some new wildlife but also seen the usual suspects of the tropics but with different antics and habits as compared to our last home in Kununurra.  Let it continue.