Question: You went to school in Alice Springs i noticed! That must have been a really interesting experience! :) How was it differant to other schools around Australia?

School in Alice Springs wasn’t actually all that different to schools in towns all over Australia. Maybe there were a few less kids, but we did all the same things as what you guys to in your schools. We might have done a few things differently, like our science classes covering more arid-zone plants, animals and habitats that people around the coast, but mostly school was normal. We were quite lucky to have a good outdoor education program, which meant that every year we got to go on really cool camps/hikes for a week in the bush.

I also went to school in remote communities as well, which was a much more interesting experience! The sizes of our classes would change, depending on which families were moving about the place that month. We were a long way from anywhere, so excursions were a really big deal, and meant we got to stay in the ‘Big Smoke’ (Alice Springs) overnight, which for us was a HUGE town. We got to learn all about bush tucker, and local culture, and once a year we’d have a big sports festival where all the kids from nearby communities (3 or 4 hours away!) would come for the weekend to camp and compete. Sometimes at lunch we’d have to chase horses or cattle out of the school yard, and some kids even rode their horses to school sometimes (I was one of them, even though I only lived across the road :D)!

We didn’t get to do much science, because we didn’t have the resources, and that’s why if I win, I’d want to go back to those communities, and spend some time with the kids doing some of the cool stuff we missed out on when I was a kid.