If you don’t know About The Voice Don’t just say ‘No’ Or maybe guess, Perhaps say ‘Yes’ Go to this link, Read, have a think Then make your choice About the voice!

Notes I meant this to be like a starter for a lesson in ‘Human Relations’ way back in the early eighties, trying to help children in my W.A. wheatbelt District High School understand what was going on in their own small town of Pingelly, W. and the wider state and nation beyond them. I was the Principal there for four years, the first woman secondary school principal in our State. In England where I had grown up there were plenty of women running secondary schools, so in my mind it was not unusual to aspire to further promotion, once my own children were independent. One day soon after the mid-eighties and all the 1983 excitement in Fremantle of the America’s Cup fame I hoped to become a Senior High School Principal. By 1985, however, I had somehow suddenly become ‘retired’ from teaching in the WA public school system, with a very generous and puzzling life-long pension from the WA Government Employees’ Superannuation Fund.

This ‘retirement’ was notionally on the medical grounds of ‘stress’ related to the control of ‘local’ adolescents in my school. But I didn’t feel in the least bit stressed, and I loved my job! Forty years ago, however, I was entirely ignorant of the history of that little town in wheatbelt WA.. Nor could I have described, even less understood, how it had been affected by the ‘White Australia Policy’ of federated Australia which had been enacted law and then repealed after some sixty years. Individual states were left to make their own rules of devolution after 1973 less than a decade before I was appointed in 1979 to the position of Principal of Pingelly District High School. I am ashamed now, of my unawareness, even ignorance, of that history. Perhaps I can perhaps be forgiven because I had seen no ‘black’ people in Perth, or even in the southern wheatbelt area around Pingelly.

When I first arrived in Australia in the early seventies from Kenya in East Africa I had been encouraged to come by the generous passage assistance of £200 paid for myself, my husband and two children who were assessed as an ideal ‘white’ immigrant family. There weren’t enough qualified teachers and accountants here ‘downunder’ it seemed. I was too busy then in my role of wife and mother to ask myself these now urgent questions about how aboriginal people, formerly occupants of their land for millenia, were now faring in Australia after two centuries of settlement by the overwhelming number of white people being financially assisted by government to settle in their country.

Although a so-called ‘educated’ person, I knew nothing much about Australia, having read only that Captain Cook ‘discovered’ it in 1770! Queen Victoria had been told it was terra nullius with no one living there so it was claimed in her name and incorporated into the British Empire. It therefore needed populating by British people, particularly by trained teachers and accountants like my husband and myself. I did know it had a very warm climate but after years of living in Africa that didn’t worry me one bit.

Nor was I concerned about teaching in a school with supposedly ‘black’ children! I saw none in my first days there when I was organizing myself and staff with rosters and timetables and soon helped by some parents with the canteen and children’s play areas. That planning was the sort of thing I’d done when I first chanced on teaching as what became my one and only real career; a ‘brief and brilliant career‘ as someone I much respected once described it to me. Of course, I’ve been happily and usefully employed in several jobs since then, but none quite as fully satisfying. Oddly, however, it set me up to become, much later, something of the political commentator and journalist I’d once aspired to be after University.

All that ‘teaching’ experience in multi-racial schools might explain something about why I wrote these lines last night, July 6th, 2023, after watching former parliamentarian, Tony Abbott, speaking to Sarah Fergusson, on behalf of the the ‘No’ vote for the Advance Australia party in our national debate on The Voice. This is a debate in which I now want to actively participate whenever and wherever possible. I’ll report more later as events unfold from here! I hope the ‘pome’ is not partisan, or contrarian, but simply educational.

Anyone with contacts in a Fremantle or Perth school who’d like a ‘guest’ speaker in for a humanist VOP, ie Very Old Person’s point of view about the Voice who has had years of teaching both black and white children elsewhere than Australia can contact me, Patriciawa, at South Beach Cafe in Fremantle for a first coffee of the day 7.30 am on, or by link to polliepomes.wordpress.com. I’d love to talk to a roomful of kids again after nearly forty years away!

P.S. 10/07/2023 Good contacts have already been made today with offers to help spreading the word about The Voice. Teachers wishing to use my ‘pome’ in an uncontroversial way, for an easy lesson on how to make a range of rhymes around a few words like ‘voice, choice, yes, guess, no, go, link, think’ please try it! Could be a fun game at home at teatime after school! School starts back this week, so already I’ve had ‘Yes’ messages on my phone as families get home from holidays.