Maggi Barnard

The past couple of months have been an exciting time fraught with change, mixed with public hysteria and fear.

As teachers, we have been strangely, but not unduly, noted as essential workers on the frontline of assisting in the fight against COVID-19.

We have been tasked with the job of teaching online, for many of us for the first time, and doing it effectively, opening the doors of our classrooms to a whole new category of educational consumer – parents.

Teaching with technology is not new, in fact, it is hard to be an accredited teacher these days without evidence of attainment in that section of the curriculum.

But teaching students remotely is very new and there had to be a lot of training to present lessons in such a way that will engage and instruct.

Personally, it meant dipping into my previous experience teaching with the Virtual Selective School provision (xSel) and the first two years of Aurora College.

Those five years gave me a great deal of practical knowledge, but kids, like society, have moved on. They moved from being email and texting students to Instagram and Snapchat students. This meant teachers had to break the content down into small enough bits so that they could grasp it.

Students started returning to school this week and at Middleton Primary they were greeted by a big, bright and cheerful lizard.

The artwork, made from recycled materials by the school community, depicts the Gunbalanya dreamtime story of the blue tongue lizard.

The students looked at and combined both traditional and modern indigenous artwork styles to create the piece measuring five metres by three metres. The lizard was drawn by Year 6 students, Jessica Larsen and Lilly Gosper, and then all students were involved in adding approximately 3,500 colourful bottle tops to complete the full picture.

The artwork has been named Barugil, which is Wiradjuri for blue tongue. The artwork was completed for the annual Waste 2 Art competition and exhibition run by NetWaste.

The project was once again directed by Helen Standen, having led the school to eight previous regional wins in the competition.

Although the competition was cancelled this year because of COVID-19, the students still enjoyed returning to school being welcomed by the eye-catching artwork.

“It is so nice for everyone to be back on board, with more and more students coming back each day,” said teacher Judy Fisher.

The whole school gets involved in the annual Waste 2 Art project during their library time learning about reducing, reusing and recycling waste.

Tim Keith, Parkes’s town crier of the past 24 years, marked this historic anniversary with a ‘Cry For Peace Around The World’ at the Cenotaph in Cooke Park.

Although the cry was done in almost complete isolation in the park, Tim raised his bell with nine other Australian town criers at exactly 3pm, while the New Zealand and Great Britain town criers followed their time zones.

It has been 75 years since the guns fell silent when Winston Churchill officially announced the end of the war in Europe and declared it to be VE Day at 3pm on Tuesday, 8th May 1945.

As a 91-year-old resident of a unit in Southern Cross Village, I feel I had little to complain about during my enforced isolation.

I have a large family, four of whom live locally and one who bought our former homestead. She and her husband live in Sydney, and after isolating for 18 days, she decided to bring her laptop in one day a week and worked from my table, with me in another room.

This, and the very brief visits of the other four when they handed in yummy cooking, and/or groceries from the door, kept me from feeling lonely, as well as extremely well fed.

I realise how fortunate I am and know there are many who either don’t have family or they live too far away to be able to do this.

My kitchen cupboards have never been so organised, as well as my wardrobe. I had time to phone people who I knew might be lonely and vulnerable for a chat.

On the negative side, my spiritual life, which is so important to me, declined. Weekend masses were discontinued, as well as daily masses at the school chapel, which I rely on for spiritual comfort. Admittedly, Father Barry arranged for a home liturgy kit to be delivered to us over Easter with all the epistle and gospel readings for Holy Week. I am still receiving a weekly bulletin with all the readings for the current weekends, so all that is missing are my fellow parishioners and Father to share them with, plus of course Holy Communion.