April 14, 2015
by Marcus Priaulx
Barambah PaCE
David and Carrie Thompson would never have guessed their legacy would extend to helping children get a better education when they started their fencing business in the 1950s.
Nor would 14-year-old Cherbourg girl Jennifer White have ever guessed the pivotal role she would play in this when she was sent to Barcaldine to work as a domestic many decades ago.
Over the decades the Thompsons built several family enterprises in and around the outback Queensland town.
These included buying and running cattle properties, contract fencing, fuelling the town’s electricity supply with charcoal burning, catering, and owning and operating a café.
David and Carrie’s son, Davey, met and married Jennifer several years after she arrived in Barcaldine and soon involved her in the family’s many enterprises.
And now Davey and Jennifer’s daughter, Cheryl, is using her assets and those of the family businesses to support the Alice River Aboriginal Student Hostel she created 15 months ago.
Through her passion for education and knowledge from being a teacher for 20 years, Cheryl is using the hostel to ensure children from remote communities are getting the education they need to succeed in life.
They wake up, have breakfast, walk to Barcaldine’s Prep-to-Year 12 State school, come home, wash their uniforms, have afternoon tea, do homework and are in bed by 9.30pm.
Phones and laptops are handed in and only allowed for a couple of hours each afternoon.
On weekends the children work in Cheryl’s family-owned Ridgee Didge Café.
If there are issues within the group they are brought to the fore and settled within yarning circles.
When at the hostel, the 13-17-year-olds attend school every day.
And if they’re late returning from holidays, Cheryl goes and gets them.
This was done with the parents’ blessing last year as they had initially left country in Boulia, Camooweal and Mt Isa to bring the children to Longreach State High School.
To do so, they had to live in overcrowded housing to afford the move and their teenagers often refused to go to school if they didn’t want to.
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Cheryl was living a comfortable lifestyle in Wynnum, Brisbane, at the time but heard of the situation and “the old people” from her Iningai tribe called her back.
When Cheryl arrived she spoke with the parents. She then helped them to enrol their children into school and register for Abstudy so they could pay for their school expenses.
Then things clicked into place and friend, David Osbourne, told her of dongas for sale at Bond University on the Gold Coast.
Cheryl bought three and they sit close to the home her grandparents built more than half a century ago.
They have four bedrooms, ensuite bathrooms, a common room and air conditioning.
Last year they housed a total of 10 girls and boys.
This year they’ll have eight girls and 12 boys from Boulia, Camooweal, Urandanjie, Alpurrurulum (Lake Nash) and Mt Isa.
She has also employed two people from Boulia to act as house parents.
Cheryl now plans to develop a recreation spot for the children to play table tennis, basketball, pool, or do activities such as their homework, or programmes with the ambulance, town’s services or community organisations.
The idea is to open the facility up for other children within the Barcaldine district and for it to become known as a “kids club”.
“We all know schools have attendance officers, homework clubs, counsellors… but they all work in silos,” Cheryl said.
“With a hostel we can bring them all together.
“We can get the children up, make sure they have breakfast, support their educational needs and ensure their home life centres around school, getting active and doing sport
“We’re also able to work with the parents while we do this job.”
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In five years Cheryl believes she will have children graduating from school and eventually returning to their communities as teachers, butchers, bakers, mechanics and nurses.
“I can see them orbiting back to country as I have,” she said
“We talk about that all the time.
“We want them to go back home and fill those positions. It’s not pretend stuff. This is what they can do.
“We can support them because we have knowledge of business through our family and can pass it onto them. That is the job of Knowledge Keepers of Business.”
Cheryl said when the children’s parents came to the hostel and saw what their children were doing it opened their eyes to the same possibilities.
She also trusts in her ‘Old People’s’ spirits and believes their calling her home was the right thing to do.
“My dad, Davey, would be looking at this and saying ‘bloody beautiful’,” Cheryl said.
“I live in the house he built with his father so they’re guiding me to the work I’m doing through their spirit.”
