02 Jun 2016
Saltbush is a program that has been running for the last three years at The Forest High School. It originally began at Ryde Secondary College and was built around the premise of students and staff from a city school and the remote school at Bourke, exchanging visits in very different communities and schools.
The Forest High students who participated left Sydney on Tuesday 17th May and returned on Saturday 21st May travelling by train to Dubbo and then coach to Bourke. Bourke is a long way from Sydney, almost to the North West corner of NSW, close to the Queensland border. The school has less than 160 students with a large proportion of these students being of Aboriginal background. Many of the city students attending have never been further west than the Blue Mountains, so experiencing a very different landscape is a new experience in itself.
When at Bourke High School, our students were allocated classes to attend, and this year the groups experienced smaller classes, different learning strategies and organisation, and got to know students from the school. They also attended sport and school assembly. They were taken on a trip to Mt Oxley to view a magnificent sunset and on Friday visited Missy at Gundabooka National Park who is a person of the stone country and was able to engage the students in stories from the past and talk abut how past cultures sustained themselves in this rugged environment. The students also viewed ancient rock art said to be 40,000 years old. Teachers participated in all of the activities and were also allocated to classes to work with the Bourke students and learn about a very different community and how it functions.
Bourke High School teachers and students will come on a return visit to our school in early August, where they will attend classes and be involved in a tour of Macquarie University. For these students it may be the first time they have experienced a large school community as well as a university campus.
