Kultitja: Memoir of an outback schoolteacher

by Linda Wells

The tin can school of a remote Aboriginal community in outback Central Australia; the earthy, stoic people of the desert; a young, bold adventurous woman from the south set free amidst it all. What could possibly go wrong?  With humour and warmth, Linda Wells captures the joy, the wonder and the hardships of life as a schoolteacher at Mount Allan community. She then describes the complexities of a cross-cultural desert relationship, complete with the good times and the bad, including alcoholism, domestic violence and co-dependency. They are all brought to life in this brave and heartfelt memoir.  memoir of an outback schoolteacher is an honest and poetic account of a young woman from suburban Melbourne who went to see what she could find amid the desert and the desert people in the centre of Australia and came face to face with herself.

182 pages, Kindle Edition

Published April 15, 2016

Reviews

[Michael]

I have been living in Alice Springs for 5 years now and I am still working my way towards getting to know the rhythms or remote living. Ms Wells, like me, was brought up in city culture, when she moved to Alice Springs and took on a job teaching at the remote community of Mount Allan, about 200 miles NW of Alice Springs. Miss Kumenjai as she came to be called spent 18 months there, weaving herself into the community as the community weaved itself into her life. She learned how to adapt to a small remote community and slowly gave up the city ways of doing things. The new name was used because there had been someone in the community named Linda who recently had passed away, and thus the name could not be spoken. One of the many local laws Ms Wells took to heart. The memoir sheds light onto the difficulties, and many joys there are to found living so remotely, such as the lack of phone service and resources and also the wide open spaces and being taken in under the local elders wings when they saw she was willing to accept their ways of doing things. There is also the frustration of dealing with a government bureaucrat who causes much grief with her unending refusal to bend the rules set in place by herself to get around a problem that needed to be solved. Ms Wells forthright confrontation of this unwillingness to help solve the problems at a community forum brought her closer to the local community and eventually saw the removal of this person from the community. This is but one episode of many. There are many friendships developed and some that turn sour, all forthrightly told. This book helped me really understand what it is like living out bush. While Alice Spring is remote, there are services here, whereas out bush, one has to live by one's wits and solve problems as help is out of reach. A must read.

[Sarah loves books 😻😻😻]

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ A very good read, and while it wasn’t the direct voice of an Aboriginal person it was certainly educational enough to classify as my Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander read for Feb. The book provided really valuable insights into using a strength-based approach to working with kids in the school system and underlined the critical importance of cultural awareness and how to adapt school activities to make them relevant to the kids and their understanding of the world (which is very different from the white western perspective). A strong 4 stars and I can highly recommend (not just to people in education but anyone who works with Aboriginal kids)!

[Kate]

I really enjoyed the ease of this read however I felt the story lacked depth. While the writing was good, aside from various painfully small mistakes that should’ve been picked up with editing, the story didn’t give much about the narrator until the last couple of chapters. It viewed community life with an humble outsiders perspective and included some engagement with self reflections but they felt basic. The final paragraph and chapters was frustrating, just as the story grew interesting it finished without further explanation. A solid 3 stars, pleasant read but didn’t leave the reader feeling all that inspired or awestruck.

[Brooke Alice (brookes.bookstagram)]

Easy read.
I thoroughly enjoyed the narrative style of this book throughout.
I am especially drawn to whitefella's experiences of Aboriginal culture and admire those that place themselves in remote communities to bridge the gap and work alongside communities, rather than forcing their white beliefs on others, and I felt that Linda Wells experienced and lived a wonderful life in the Mount Allan community and was able to write beautifully about her experience.
4.5/5 stars, would be 5/5 but for the countless grammatical errors throughout.

[ieva]

I wanted to have an easy introduction to what education in Aboriginal communities is like, and just a bit about the culture itself. And that’s exactly what I got - a great read for complete newbies, and a beautiful life experience to have read about.