Riverview Stories and the Aboriginal Frog

Enjoying my participation in the Riverview School Artist in Residence project. I'm helping students enjoy the experience of telling stories and creating them.

There's a great photo and article about the project  on the Queensland Times newspaper website.

It was great to have Aunty Ruth Moffat drop in to listen to some of her grandchildren taking part. She told us some of her stories of working as a Teacher's Aid at Riverview (among other places). One of the little anecdotes she shared was of a young girl telling her that she had 'seen an Aboriginal frog' at her place. When Aunty Ruth asked her why it was an Aboriginal frog, the girl said, "That's because it's covered in dots."

The students loved the story of course so we added it to the story we created about a visit by the Riverview School Christmas Choir visit to Riverview Gardens Retirement Village.

I love this sort of working, being able to share stories and retell them in completely different  settings.

Mind you, you have to be quite flexible working in a school. We were recording our story as we created it and I had 4 students singing Rudolf the Red Nose Reindeer as if they were performing at the retirement village. It sounded great. We advanced the story and got in the frog and I turned to our 'choir' to record them singing again but I had found that 3 of the 4 had left to catch buses. Our remaining choir member rose to the occasion however and sang our improvised song quite brilliantly.

Another quite wonderful adaption was finding out that one of the original choir members 'wasn't really in the choir' and that, despite a disability, had won the school comedy competition last year. I asked her if we could record her pretending to tell a joke at Riverview Gardens. She did so swimmingly:

'Why did the fish cross the sea?"

"Why?"

"To get to the other tide."

I'm hoping Aunty Ruth will come back and tell us some of her stolen generation story. The multipurpose hall at Riverview is named after her husband Uncle Jack who sadly passed away in 2008.

You can read some of her story on the Goodna State School website at:

http://www.goodnaschool.net/indig_perspective/ruth_moffatt.html

Riverview Stories

The Riverview School Artists in Residence Project is underway! The adventure has begun.

I enjoyed the warmup session with the teachers on the third of their start of year professional development days. The energy was interesting - professional but playful. The story we created together is rough. It had to be, we didn't have enough time for anything but rough, but it does have all the components I'm hoping for in this project,  local setting - the skate bowl in Pickering Street, students as characters and some local flavour.

 

Skate Bowl from Google Street View in Hayden St, Riverview

It was good watching the teachers working out how to have a bit of fun with the process. One way was their choosing students who had been a little challenging for them last year as the characters in their story. I got so much pleasure out of seeing their linocuts and look forward to putting them together with the text of the story on the project blog.

Stories of place are such an important part of community and cultural development. We all live in place and are shaped by place. Our stories are shaped by place and our stories shape our places. Telling stories about our places helps us take pride in our country, our town and in ourselves.

The four introductory storytelling and story creation sessions in the library with the whole of school were rich and textured. Most of the sessions went well although the years 4,5,6 year session didn't get off to as good a start as I would have wished because the Queensland Times journo and photographer had arrived just before the start.

I'm looking forward to meeting with the four participation classes this week and working with them to develop their stories.

Daryll