The Gowrie Boys

An old friend sent me a youtube link from her former college which has entirely blown my mind. Let me share:



It makes me want to cry it's so beautiful, but you'll only understand my reaction if you know that St Teresa's Abergowrie College in Far North Queensland has become "the last chance before jail" dumping ground for troubled and trouble-making Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island teenagers ...

... but just listen to them. That's some serious wisdom they've taken deep into themselves.

I think I may have told you before that I spent a while in the mid 80s teaching in the Australian Outback in Far North Queensland, where the Aboriginal kids were so deeply troubled and so off the rails that my 'inner moral compass' and my 'inner Fijian' combined to urge me to do some serious "Self-Esteem Building", so I'd do stuff outside of school with them, mainly Theatre Sports and modelling and choreography and dancing and other sorts of fashionista-style projects, seen by everyone else to have no value whatsoever but definitely enjoyed by all of us ... and yes, the kids I worked with have gone on to do great things, although I won't name names ... Deborah Mailman might take offense.

It was all my own thing, done in my own time, without funding or support from anywhere, (except for those two sublime ladies Lyn G. and Anna B.) (Still love you both, you honeys!) and because it was a concept so new there was nothing out there to use so I had to come up with stuff of my own invention ...

... and also to suffer a great deal of vicious, tearing-at-the-flesh criticism and heavy-duty flak because everyone in the white community - as well as a number of truly nasty adults in the Aboriginal camps - was convinced I was off-the-planet and a dangerous meddler to boot.

I have to tell you, those were rough years. The Australian Outback genuinely is a horrible place, especially when it disapproves of you, so much so I could even claim that what I went through was something along the lines of "The horror! The horror!" which turned up in my nightmares of sharks attacking and tearing apart my shark-cage to get at me. Yes, night after night, the same dreams, however, in those dreams I progressively armed myself with increasingly large electrical cattle prods, an obvious reference to my 'broken record' response to the flak wherein I'd raise one of my eyebrows and say in my very best British Colonial Service voice, "Oh, do you really think so?"

Yeah, it was rough, but this is me we're talking about here. I've always admired St Joan of Arc and, you know how it is. I felt a duty to my amazing parents to wage war against injustice and all that yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah!  But to know how bad this all got, let me tell you that the phrase from Shakespeare's Macbeth "I am so far now into the blood that it is easier to go forward then to go back" spent a great deal of time in the forefront of my mind, as did several of the more obscure verses in T.S. Eliot's "The Wasteland", the main of which I still now know off by heart since it spent so long lodged inside me.

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow

Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,

You cannot say, or guess, for you know only

A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,

And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,

And the dry stone no sound of water. Only

There is shadow under this red rock

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow at morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

 And after all this hell-on-earth, I was outraged to discover many years later that the very nastiest of these Outback Nasties have claimed various of my Self-Esteem Projects as their own work and have them outlined in their C.V.s.  No, they seriously have.  Honestly, don't you just want to slap people.

However, this post is meant to be about the Gowrie Boys, not me so ...

Yes, I know that "Self-Esteem Raising" among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island teenagers has become exceptionally fashionable these days, but it's most usually the type of immediately transparent bullshit you'd expect from fashionably P.C. types ... however what's been done with the Gowrie Boys seems seriously kick-arse and effective so I was intensely curious about who it could be, and to this end I've been exploring the other youtube clips they've made ... and let me show you one where I think I've identified who it could be:



See that exceptionally large black man behind the boys?  He's wearing the school uniform but he looks like an adult.  I think he's an American black man working with these kids, and he's certainly large enough to have their instant respect, respect being the first step of any attempt to raise the esteem of any troubled youth.

Anyway, from this clip I'm guessing this is him, and I'm guessing he's the Toby Finlayson mentioned in this blurb:

"This hip hop track is an outcome from a project called 'Song Nation' -- A collaboration between Toby Finlayson and Matthew Priestley from Desert Pea Media, The Smugglers Of Light Foundation, Vibe Australia and APRA/ AMCOS."

And even if I'm wrong about this, I hope you're as impressed as I am with the outcome. And that you too want to offer kudos to Toby and Matthew for some completely amazing work.

It's really all about encouraging souls to breathe free and these kids are clearly inhaling and exhaling up the whazoo!  And isn't it nice to know that these days it can all happen, presumably, without anyone being ripped apart by cage-tearing sharks!

GOWRIE BOYS, YOU ROCK!  And Toby?  If it's indeed you who has mentored these kids into such deep wisdom, let a voice from a harsher and more brutal past offer you my "Yo Bro, RESPECT!!!"