Arabic version: طلاب مدرسة الجو في بيلبرا يسجلون أغنية كانتري
According to ABC News, students from Port Hedland’s School of the Air have collaborated with Australian country musician Josh Arnold on a song and music video, Kids from the Pilbara. The children gathered at Yarrie Station, a 250,000-hectare cattle operation about 1,500 kilometres north of Perth, for the recording.
The project brought together 21 students who receive distance education across the Pilbara’s vast interior. Nine-year-old Tanami Fox-Coppin said lessons are completed by computer with a governess in places including a school room near the station offices and under a tree in the bush. She said students usually see their school friends only three times a year and was happy to host classmates for two days of camping and filming at her family’s property.
Arnold said the recording was intended to give rural students pride in their school and identity as station children. The Toowoomba musician has recorded more than 400 songs with rural and remote students across Australia during more than 15 years of similar creative projects. He grew up on a sheep and wheat farm near Tara in Queensland’s Western Downs and said he would have valued the chance to sing about his own upbringing and school.
The video captures aspects of Pilbara station life, including children riding horses at a creek, using motorbikes, singing around the homestead and joining a campfire singalong. Arnold said the gathering was particularly meaningful because the students had not seen one another for some time.
Yarrie Station owner Annabelle Coppin, Tanami’s mother, said School of the Air was vital for bush families and that projects such as the video could improve students’ attitudes towards school. She said the model could be flexible and personalised, with parents or governesses guiding children at home, but required more effort than sending children to a town school. School of the Air, established in Alice Springs in 1951, now enables Coppin’s children to video call teachers rather than use the scratchy radio system she used as a student at Yarrie.
