Day Two

We’re up at tradie-o’clock as we’re faux tradies for the morning. We head straight to Djarragun Enterprises and split into groups to join a few different crews.

My crew supervisor is Sonny (on the right, below, with Morgan and Clive). Sonny’s been with Djarragun Enterprises for 2.5 years and has been crew supervisor for about a year. He’s just finished his Cert III in Horticulture - the first Djarragun Enterprises employee to achieve this, what a legend. It’s also his 21^st birthday on Saturday. Ah, youth…

Anyway, we spend the morning doing jobs for QBuild which involved landscaping for a number of different public housing properties. This means:

• Mowing lawns (a first for me – lawn mowers are so heavy to push, who knew?!)
• Edging with a whipper-snipper (another first, another heavy tool)
• Spraying weeds (the pesticides backpack leaked and I got round-up down my back, but at least it wasn’t that heavy!)
• Hedging with a chainsaw (I steered clear of this for everyone’s safety)
• Tidying everything up with a blower (deceivingly heavy!)

After a few hours of work and about six properties completed, the faux tradies left exhausted. It was great to get an understanding of what’s involved for the Djarragun crews, but I can’t believe they keep this up all day – very impressive.

Cape York Land Council briefing

After a much-needed shower, we break into groups again to get a brief from each organisation that we’ll work with over the next six weeks. I visit the Land Council with Kevin, who also works for my bank in the same building in Sydney but who I’ve never seen in my life!

CEO Peter Callaghan and Prescribed Body Corporate (PBC) Unit Director Jim Davis give us an overview of some of the Land Council’s achievements so far and talk about all the work that still needs to be done. Some of which we’ll be helping with – which is nice to know.

Djarragun College briefing

Next up we all head to Djarragun College, about 20 minutes south of Cairns city, where two secondees from our group will be working.

A well-known blemish on Australian education is that the education outcomes of remote Indigenous students are not up to scratch. In fact, they’re well below those of non-Indigenous students. My brother Peter taught at an Indigenous school on Bathurst Island last year and became so frustrated by the curriculum. He was meant to teach kids what a noun is, as you would at Knox in Sydney, but because the social environment they’re growing up in is very different and much more challenging, many of these kids couldn’t even spell noun.

This is where the Cape York Aboriginal Australian Academy (CYAAA) comes in.

At three other schools across the Cape – Aurukun, Hopevale and Mossman – they’re seeking to address this issue by delivering the CYAAA program. Djarragun College in Cairns has also adopted the methodology implanted in the remote schools by CYAAA.

Led by Noel Pearson and Cape York Partnerships, CYAAA delivers a 'best of both worlds' education to Indigenous students. It aims to close the academic achievement gap between indigenous and mainstream students and to support Cape York children's bi-cultural identity.

The Academy's program is focused on:

• Class: dedicated to teaching mainstream curriculum in English literacy and numeracy
• Club: enriching extracurricular artistic, musical and sport programs
• Culture: comprehensive Indigenous culture and language programs

Club and culture sessions are compulsory for boarders at Djarragun College and we were lucky enough to see their club and culture sessions in action on our afternoon visit. Some of the kids were doing art, others athletics and there was also a music class too I think. Pretty cool.