After a few early mornings, it was wonderful to not need to rush out the door this morning. And the fact that the kids slept in until after 7:30am was definitely a sign that they needed a bit of an extra sleep as well!
Our first stop this morning was the Alice Springs Telegraph Station. It hadn’t really occurred to me until we were there this morning, but you can definitely create a connection between the creation of the Overland Telegraph Line to Telstra today – so that was a bit cool for me! We arrived just in time for the 9:30am tour, and we were taken into the historic reserve where all the beautiful buildings still stand.
Our tour guide talked us through the timeline of life at the Telegraph Station – from the creation of the OTL (Overland Telegraph Line) overall, through to how Alice Springs was named as the Telegraph Station was established here, to also acknowledging the awful past when these buildings were used to house the stolen generation for many, many years.
After she’d talked us through this timeline, she suggested a few different things to look at, and then we were left to self-guide ourselves through the rest of the buildings. It was great to see a really detailed timeline of what our tour guide had run through, including a lot of detail about how the OTL was built (which I found really interesting). There was also a morse code station set up at either end of a long room, and the kids tried to send morse code messages to each other!
From there we headed only a short distance across to the Alice Springs School of the Air! This is something we were really excited for the kids to see first hand – how kids the same age as them go about school when they live somewhere that’s hundreds of kilometres from their classmates. Interestingly enough, thanks to COVID, it’s not as foreign a concept as it once was. But it was still a wonderful chance to learn about the history of the School of the Air (realising that they used radio for school right up until 2005!), along with how it works for students today.
It was great to hear a consistent use of the word “classroom” for a child’s workspace at home – helping them feel that they have a similar experience to other kids who attend school in person every day. Also great to see that the connectivity and equipment they need to connect is covered by the school – at a cost of $18,000 per child! But that seems so logical when you think about the School of the Air being a Department of Education school, and that every other kid in the state has access to the technology in their classrooms.
The kids really loved the tour, and learning about how they do things so differently. Unfortunately, we didn’t get a chance to see much of an online class happening, as it was “in school week” this week, meaning that most of the 130 kids were actually physically at school in Alice Springs for the week! That happens 4 times a year. So they were off doing activities or classes somewhere else. The visitors centre acts as the fundraising arm for the school – so our tour costs, plus souvenirs we bought, all go back to the school, which was great to know.
We had a brief pause in proceedings during the afternoon – Debbie tweaked her lower back earlier this morning. It definitely wasn’t getting any better as the day went on, and she was in quite a bit of pain. We managed to find a chiro with an appointment available this afternoon, and so we dropped her off for a short appointment while the kids and I went into Woolies to get a few things for dinner – and the kids also wanted to get Debbie a card and a little chocolate for her, which was adorable.
Once we were back home, Debbie was keen to keep moving rather than sit and rest. So we still decided to head out to Simpsons Gap for a bit of a walk, as we’d intended to do initially this afternoon. And the bonus was that the sun was starting to get really low – not quite sunset, but it still made for some beautiful views. Surprisingly, there was barely another soul along the Simpsons Gap walk! We enjoyed exploring the mostly dried up river bed, and just standing in awe at the huge rock cliffs that sit either side of the Gap. Unfortunately, no rock wallabies to be seen this time.
Debbie’s back is starting to feel better this evening, thankfully. She’ll head back for a follow up chiro visit early tomorrow morning to hopefully help stabilise things – and then hopefully we’ll still get to the couple of things we have planned for tomorrow!
