Kalgoorlie School of the Air celebrates 60-year milestone

The Kalgoorlie School of the Air on Saturday celebrated 60 years of providing quality education to children based in the Goldfields–Esperance Education Region.

A full day of activities organised by the school’s parents and community committee helped teachers, students, parents, school community members and anyone else connected to the school celebrate the milestone.

Eighty people attended the morning’s activities which included filling the time capsule, planting trees, singing the school song, cutting the celebratory cake, and playing some old school games.

Tallaya Wood, a member of the school’s P&C, said the current teachers and students opened up the classroom on site to display their work for everyone attending the day.

“We have an amazing group of former P&C members that had archived everything in our 60-year history so we displayed lots of things at the event like old school uniforms and student’s work books,” she said.

“It was really important for us to celebrate the milestone because SOTA is a very different type of school — it is a community for bush people.”

Mrs Wood said as most of the parents were pastoralists, miners, service station owners and rangers it was important to have this connection to other families.

“We are very proud of our school — it is a unique place,” she said.

Mrs Wood, who lives on Rawlinna Station about 400km east of Kalgoorlie-Boulder with her husband, has two children that access the school’s services — a daughter in Year 1 and son in Year 4.

“It is so important to be able to access good education even though we are out in the bush,” she said.

“We wouldn’t be living out here if we couldn’t access education for the kids.

“These guys make it easy to live out here knowing that we are not doing the wrong thing by the kids.”

In the evening, a cocktail event took place at Kalgoorlie-Boulder Racing Club complete with silent auction and live band for all current and former parents, teachers and community members to mingle and reminisce about days gone by.

“The teachers’ jobs are pretty hard so it was nice to relax and socialise with them in a different setting,” Mrs Wood said.

The time capsule pictured was made and donated by local boilermaker and former Kalgoorlie SOTA student Callum McQuie from Bulga Downs Station, who will weld it shut.

Students wrote letters to their future selves and placed them inside the capsule among other memorabilia that will be opened in 20 years time.