Bus Lines

Scary Stuff – March 10th, 2008 by Kristen

The Sydney Morning Herald this morning had a front page feature on the increasing segregation of children in the Australian education system.

I first saw racial segregation when I was 11 years old. Until then I had been fairly naïve about racism in Australia, being a white kid whose only contact with anyone Aboriginal had been my mum’s aunties and cousins (playing with my second cousins in their Brisbane backyards) and playing with the kids staying with their mums in the women’s refuge where my grandmother was a worker. We had no Aboriginal kids at my school; it was almost completely white.

I had read about racism, in American books, about the civil rights struggles and war against slavery. But never really seen it in the Australia I lived in, on the Gold Coast in Queensland in the 80’s and 90’s.

In 1993, in year six, I went on a school trip for a week to the Queensland border town of Goondiwindi. I stayed on a sheep farm with a family struggling under the drought, showering only twice in the week I was there, and even those two minutes under the precious water were begrudgingly allowed. The house was surrounded by the bones of slaughtered lambs that had been gnawed by the farm dogs, and you inhaled flies with every breath (the constant wave across your face to shoo flies was called the Goondi salute).

We had to get up at 5:00 am every morning to catch the bus to Goondi (say it with me, Guuuundi), a bus trip that took two hours, after the half hour drive out the property to the road.

Rosa Parks once refused to give up her seat to a white man on a bus. I once tried to sit at the back of the school bus at Goondi and was firmly yanked to the front by the kids I was staying with. Apparently I had failed to notice that that was where the Abo kids sat.

They sat quietly up the back, faces averted from us. The line that separated white from black was two sets of empty seats at the middle of the bus. As the bus filled, white kids stood up the front, despite empty seats next to black kids at the back. The Aboriginal kids were headed to Boggabilla, which I was given the impression, until I read about it today, was a special Aboriginal only school.

Every morning the white kids played with a rubber ball up the front, bouncing it between us. Once, it accidentally bounced up past those two sets of seats. At first, no one moved to get it. Just sort of stared at it, waiting for it roll back. The memory of the Aboriginal boy who eventually handed it back to me stands out for me, because of how sharply the ball was snatched from his hand by one of my hosts, and how expressionless his face was.

Everyday the bus was the same, to Goondi and back. During the day my class visited all around Goondiwindi. It was so different to my life on the sunny Gold Coast, so much more serious and harsh. The people and kids we met were hard - friendly to an extent, but sort of suspicious and disdainful of the dumb city kids.

The exception to this was when we visited for the day at the Boggabilla School. Newly built, flooded with sunshine that prior to then seemed an enemy, what I remember most of the Boggabilla School was the smiles. Laughing, smiling kids who danced and sang for us and then we played lots of games. Strangely, the Boggabilla kids (all of whom were Aboriginal, hence my mistaken belief that this was a special Aboriginal school) in their school did not stand out as separate to us when we played with them, despite all us Gold Coast kids being white, and them all being black. It was only on the bus that their Aboriginality became a point of separation.

The segregation I experienced was not institutionalised. It was not enforced by outside adult forces. The bus driver never told the black kids to sit at the back. The kids themselves segregated their bus trip, as they went to their black and white public schools. I never questioned it out loud, apart from that first morning, but it remains in my mind as the first, and worst, racism I have ever seen. Worst, because that was just the way things were.

After the Boggabilla visit I had to catch the bus back to my host’s farm. I saw the kids I had played with that day sitting up the back. I gave them a quick, ashamed wave, and then I sat up the front with the other white kids.

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Aboriginal relations, Black and White, Education System, Racism, Segregation

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