IT’S 9.30am in the remote indigenous community of Wadeye. The school bus has been and gone. Shane Raymond’s two daughters should have been on it. Instead they mill about on the veranda as a local dog exterminator drops in.
Wadeye, Australia’s largest Aboriginal township, is in the grip of a school attendance crisis, with many indigenous parents accused of actively discouraging their children from going to school.
Like many parents in the town, Ms Raymond says her daughters are either too sick or scared to go to school.
Her 10-year-old daughter Clara complains she gets in fights; her other daughter, Lena, 8, has a sore foot and hasn’t been to school all week.
According to a report by Australian National University demographer John Taylor, only 21 per cent of the community’s 890 school-aged children went to school at least four days out of five.
The enrolment figure at the local school, Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, was almost 700 last year, leaving almost 200 children out of school. Across this remote town, 600km southwest of Darwin, it’s a similar story.
Relative Emmanuel Kurungaiyi’s 13-year-old son Mark has missed the bus too.
“He’s probably next door,” Mr Kurungaiyi says.
“Sometimes they play game machines. That happens a lot around this community.”
Both parents say they know the importance of school and insist they make an effort to get them there. But Charlie Pribil, school bus driver at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart, tells a different story as he invites The Weekend Australian on board.
Mr Pribil says claims made by education officials that indigenous parents are actively discouraging their children from attending school and abusing school bus drivers are true.
“The parents will drag their kids away or the kids will run,” says Mr Pribil, who has been doing the run for the past two years.
“This town should have 700 kids going to the school.”
Mr Pribil says he’s not allowed to urge parents to put their children on the bus. “I can’t say anything. I’m not allowed to. They tell me to get stuffed.” Mr Pribil says Friday is “the worst day” as many parents and carers gambled away their welfare payments.
The bus trundles along and slowly fills up as parents farewell their children for the day. Others are less motivated.
As we round the corner, Mr Pribil points to a blue house – that of Ms Raymond and Mr Kurungaiyi.
“That’s the house. They never come,” Mr Pribil says.
Inside, Clara and Lena and several of the community’s 890 school-aged children run about, as feral dogs steal food from their hands.
Mr Kurungaiyi and Ms Raymond concede their children don’t attend school regularly but say there are good reasons for their absenteeism.
“My little girl complained to me that she is scared of the other kids because they’re fighting,” Ms Raymond says. “I followed her there and saw it with my own eyes.”
Around town it’s the same refrain: “Fighting”, says 10-year-old Regina Dumoo. Ms Raymond says she’s going to “walk her 10-year-old to school and take the other one up to the clinic”.
Many other school-aged children were still at home mid-morning, sleeping or playing.
Having done some schooling at Darwin’s St John’s College, Mr Kurungaiyi knows school is important.
“I tell my kids they’ve got school tomorrow and they just say ‘one more game’.”
Former OLHS deputy principal Chris Pollard told a Territory parliamentary committee last month parents in the 2500-strong town were actively preventing their children from attending school.
“We have kids hiding in the ceilings, we have parents abusing the bus driver as he drives past, telling him ‘we are not sending our kids there’,” said Mr Pollard, now a consultant with the Catholic Education Office.
Thamarrurr Development Corporation chief executive John Berto says such claims are outlandish, and blames absenteeism on overcrowding, parent fatigue and lack of discipline.
“Parents get sick and tired of telling their kids to go to school,” Mr Berto says.
“They want their kids to go to school, but the kids lack discipline. The older they get the more cunning they get. A lot of parents don’t discipline their kids.”
OLHS co-principal Tobias Nganbe declined to talk to The Weekend Australian, but there is little sign of violence at the school, which has recently undergone extensive upgrades, including a library and cultural centre.
At 20 students, OLHS teacher Xaverina Bunduck’s grade 2 class was two-thirds full when The Weekend Australian visited this week.
The students clamour around the whiteboard, shouting answers in their native tongue Murrinh-patha as they discover the Stations of the Cross and the breeding cycle of the sea turtle.
Asked to explain the reason behind the absenteeism, Ms Bunduck, 43, says some families keep their children home to help with chores, with computer games also a distraction.
“Some parents stop their kids from going to school for babysitting. Some kids have got computer games at home. That’s why they don’t want to go to school,” she says.