HONI SOIT WEEK TEN 2022
PERSPECTIVE | 11
‘Buildings were lost, our school wasn’t’: Education in a changing climate Tiger Perkins explores how schools in disaster-affected communities have managed challenging circumstances.
T
he Lismore floods have devastated the entire community, with their impacts extending not just to every individual but also to the institutions at the heart of the Lismore community. One such institution is the Living School, a not-for-profit, progressive, independent school established in 2020. Earlier this year the school was completely flooded, with harrowing images on their website showing the second storey of the school poking its head above a sea of water. The school’s small campus was originally intended to push students out into the community as part of their philosophical approach to community-based learning. Even before the floods, classes were held at the nearby TAFE, in the library, in galleries and on a houseboat, purpose-bought to float maths and science students down the river as they learned. However, with the campus rendered unusable by water damage, they were forced to relocate first to the Lennox Head Rugby Clubhouse, then to the nearby farm of Principal John Stewart, before finally settling on the grounds of the Southern Cross University Campus. The floods have forced the school and its community to conduct a conceptual reassessment of what school and community mean. Jonny Wouters, a teacher at the Living
School noted that, “assumptions I had made about life that I thought were stable were suddenly washed away and I had to regain a sense of the landscape because the landscape was different internally and externally.” Another teacher, Ant Lewry, reflected on the isolating experience of his home going underwater, “I was on my own. I couldn’t reach anybody. I had never experienced anything like this before. I had never been more scared than in those moments, on that day, in those hours. I had never felt more alone. The fear that I felt then, as someone who has experienced a fair bit of trauma in my life - nothing compared to that day.” With characteristically inadequate support from the government, the community supported itself, “It felt like the most obvious and only thing to do - be there for one another”. Jonny described the experience of teachers forced to appropriate the role of SES workers and rescue their neighbours and friends, as he did for Ant. “Our dear friend who lives up the road, we went to go get him - on a kayak - as the road wasn’t drivable. His terrified face along with all of the terrified faces we passed. We kept each other sane.” Unbelievably, alongside these accounts, is the story that the school, not as a campus but as a place of learning, was only closed for five days. Moving between their various
classrooms in the Rugby Club, on the farm and at the University over the subsequent weeks, it becomes clear that a school is not just the building that springs to mind when we hear the word. Rather, it is a concept. It is a spirit, a philosophy and an environment, an idea that is perhaps more acutely felt in communities such as Lismore. Sandringham Primary School 15km outside of Melbourne, which was largely destroyed by a fire in early 2020, reflects a similar approach to learning and community. Principal Lousie Neave noted that “In our communication with families we were mindful to refrain from saying ‘our school is lost’ or ‘we need to rebuild our school’, because a school is more than buildings. School is community and people, it’s familiar faces, classmates and amazing teachers. And we didn’t lose that. Buildings were lost, our school wasn’t.” An understanding has emerged from these two communities of what schools are. Ant notes he is “not grateful for the pain but for the growth and for the love and connection that has come from it.” Ultimately, although inspiring, these communities should not be forced to rely upon themselves in such ways. With tokenistic emissions reductions targets, our government denies the science and existence of climate change that contributes
to extreme events such as the Lismore floods. It then fails to provide adequate support and relief, perhaps most appallingly encapsulated by MP Peter Dutton’s GoFundMe for flood victims in his electorate of Dickson. Matthew Wade, writer for The Conversation, decried such a passing around of the hat suggesting that, “For many, Dutton’s campaign reflected a wider lack of planning and urgency to mitigate extreme weather events, but it also reveals the everyday normalisation of crowdfunding. What does it say about the role of government, the reciprocal duties of citizens, and how we can best support each other in difficult times, when no less than the federal defence minister turns to crowdfunding?” Continually asking communities to show resilience is “not ok for anybody. It’s not good modelling. It’s hurtful…I think we are sometimes expected to be resilient in an unhealthy way,” says Ant. While the floods have forced positive reconceptualisations and understandings of learning, community and support, we must stop hoping that people are resilient and start planning for a future fraught with climate disasters.
The case for colourful cities Nicholas Osiowy explores how schools in disaster-affected communities have managed challenging circumstances.
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he city is probably the single greatest expression of humanity in existence.It has been the beginning and end of civilisations, the shelter of scientists and artists. When aliens attack, we imagine their ships poised over our grandest capitals. But there has been a change. For nearly a century, the West has gradually succumbed to the greyscale, building cities of cookie-cutter concrete and painting our architectural heritage black. “The evening is spread out against the sky like a patient etherised upon a table,” TS Eliot bemoaned in his inert persona of Prufrock.
“The colourful loveliness of a summer’s day” His simile seems less tired now. Just replace ‘etherised’ with ‘sanitised.’ Bushfires, pandemic, war, and climate catastrophe. These are enough to make anyone look at a city with gloom. But to add the tranquiliser of our own urban failure, our paralysis of design, creativity, vibrancy and diversity; this can only make it worse. The case for colourful cities begins with aesthetics. The modernist aspirations behind the greyscale were certainly admirable. After a century of ornamentation, it promised to reinvigorate cities, to make them clean, planned, ideal, and new. Yet few could object that when done ad nauseam, like anything else, it feels less clean and more empty; less planned and more systematised. One monochrome house is interesting; a row of them is a wall. This is not to say that the greyscale has no place, but it must be one colour among many. We naturally find our sense of beauty in nature. Since living among trees doesn’t support our lifestyle, the only solution is to mimic the natural world in our cities. The push by many councils towards increasing
canopy coverage is one factor, but just as nature is incomplete without flowers, so too is a city without colours. There is science behind this too. A 2018 study by QUT researcher Sofie Pringle identified colour as being closely associated with individuals’ perceived happiness in a city. Meanwhile, a different study from Canada’s University of Waterloo identified that “spaces with a colourful, communitydriven urban intervention were associated with higher levels of happiness, trust, stewardship and attraction to the sites.” This points to a particularly relevant concern for Australia’s cities; colour’s relationship with urban diversity and culture. There are few places where the phenomenon of greyscale has been more prevalent, or more destructive, than in the gentrification of Australia’s inner-cities. When the phenomenon began in the late 1990s, it promised the preservation of our architectural heritage. Frightened by the memory of uber-modernist architect Harry Seidler, we were all too happy to see the inner-city cleaner and safer. What we did not understand was that these words represented destruction, not rejuvenation. They represented displacement; of the poor, the working class, artists, minorities, and First Nations people. The greyscale became more than fashion; applying it marked its owner a member of this nouveau-gentry — and eventually, its omission marked one as being other. The colour of the inner-city had not simply been a cultural quirk. It represented the presence of a genuine urban village, and all the richness and vibrancy that comes with it. In her book, The Life and Death of Great American Cities (1961), urbanist Jane Jacobs underlines this tendency towards “supposedly cosy, inward-turned city neighbourhoods,” and emphasises that in cities, where many people do not know one another, this effort can be disastrous. Though it may be convenient to plan a city by parcelling it up into districts, one
for the rich, poor, black, or white, this only ruins the city’s capacity to use its greatest asset; throwing its inhabitants together unpredictably. In Australia, our unique tragedy has been that our inner-cities once supported such spaces; intimate, warm and full of potential, now lost to the memory of films like Gillian Armstrong’s The Last Days of Chez Nous. This plan, descended from the modernists, has offered only the opportunity to commodify, decolour, and ultimately disintegrate our cities. There are a host of examples here in Sydney, culminating in the housing tragedy of The Block. Once a colourful and vibrant centre for First Nations People, it marked Redfern as perhaps the last case of genuine urban diversity in Sydney,where beau monde, bo-ho, and bogan mixed with students and the oldest First Nations settlement in Australia. Eventually destroyed in 2019, its replacement stands as a concrete
monument. Now only the occasional unpleasantness of its former presence breaks the students’ commute. And down Eveleigh Street, where children once played soccer in front of the Aboriginal flag, the last Victorian terraces have been painted grey. Undeniably, this Great Greying marks a choice for us. To continue, to submit to this alienating force to push us apart and under. Or to agitate and build a city worthy of humanity’s splendorous diversity that we might compare to the colourful loveliness of a summer’s day.
ART BY ZARA ZADRO
