Not in Kansas

Australia Blog

From being feted with a palatial suite at one quilt conference – it was bigger than my first apartment, and much more expensively furnished – to being put up in volunteer’s homes in rooms that are clearly more storeroom than guest room, the accommodations part of my teaching travels is always a bit of a crap shoot. At this conference in the middle of a national park 3 hours NW of Melbourne, Australia, teachers were stowed in a caravan park in cabins next to camp sites for tents and Winnebagos. The cabins were clean prefab jobs with verandas and full kitchens. I was surprised to find that the single room stated on my contract was a single room in a shared cabin, but how else would I have had the experience of comparing teaching experiences with a Tasmanian roommate?

The conference organizer fed all the teachers breakfast each morning, and I knew I wasn’t in Portland when I encountered an emu and kangaroos foraging for their morning brekkie on my short walk to her cabin. The human Ozzie natives at the breakfast gathering assured me that the monkeys that had woken me up in the morning were not misplaced primates, but their avian sound-alikes, kookaburras. They proved to be my alarm clock for the rest of the week, laughing into my window at 6.45 each morning.

A kangaroo with a joey in her pocket greeted me outside my classroom door on my first teaching morning, to remind me things are different here. So different that my classroom was the poolside rec room in a campground further up the road in the park. No matter where I am, my teaching days usually begin with a half hour of room rearranging, and in this venue I pushed couches around the fireplace for a gathering spot and tables to the windows since the classroom had a total of six light bulbs. From my days of working in the Arts in Education program in Portland schools, where I dyed fabric in bathrooms with kindergarteners, to the odd classroom experience of mixing dyes in a carpeted, upholstered formal dining room of a Caribbean cruise ship, I’ve discovered that problem solving and flexibility are as high on the job description as teaching skills. I’m pretty good at both, as I suspect many women are, but what I’ve learned on the job over the years is when to stop being flexible and demand a better situation for my students. The student stuck in a dim crowded claustrophic corner near the bathroom isn’t going to be a happy camper no matter how well I teach. Since the sun shone during our class, six lightbulbs were sufficient to keep people happily at work. The deep wells of fabric paint a local supplier sent, along with the morning teas of scones and muffins, didn’t hurt either, so flexibility won the day over confrontation.

Bill arrived toward the end of my second class, after a heroic solo drive from the Melbourne airport – undertaken after a 14 hour flight -- and on the left side of the road to boot. He was smart and decided on the option of renting a GPS, and I think the device, quickly dubbed Valerie Victoria, smoothed the way for him. In this second classroom (this time booked in a spacious, albeit equally dim, hotel conference room with a terrifyingly hideous red carpet which no amount of room arranging could obscure) I laid out the map of Australia Bill had bought at the airport, and my class took on the project of helping us to decide which bits of Victoria we would tour after the conference ended. We took on their advice and an additional passenger after they gifted me with a wonderful stuffed wombat named Wally who despite being the burly silent type knew his way around the area. With the help of Wally’s innate geographical knowledge and Valerie’s computer-generated Ozzie accent, we found our way around the Grampian byways that remained open after last month’s floods, then on to the Great Ocean Road. We had a bit of a where-am-I experience as we pulled into our first night’s lodging – in Portland. We are chagrined to admit we were so busy figuring out which direction to head the next morning, we left without the expected photo of two Oregonian Portlanders standing by a Victoria Portland sign.

Twelve Apostles, Great Ocean Road

Our week of post-class touring gave us views of the Southern Ocean graced by land formations I would love to translate to fabric, encounters with koalas, kangaroos, emus, and wallabies in the wild, vast windfarms, and glimpses of Australian art in a succession of mostly free museums scattered across the state, in big and little towns. Most of all, it gave us slices of other people’s stories: the students who have lived through drought and fire, floods and locusts and were driven to translate those experiences into their artwork, the couple at the breakfast table next to ours in little Port Campbell who called everyone they knew to announce their engagement while waiting for their meals (for those who are interested in these slice of life dramas, he had the ring designed especially for her; I’m guessing he was pretty certain of her answer), the teacher who has started her own yarn supply business and travels to Shanghai and Italy to talk with her manufacturers.

So no matter where I lay my head after class, this strange and accidental career of mine allows me to gather images and stories en route to the (sometime under-lit and dubiously appointed) classrooms filled with interesting women eager to stitch their visions with fabric and thread. I may luxuriate in the times I am housed in one of those resorts with marble lined loos, but even the accommodations that give me tents as neighbors provide me with bonuses like an antipodean morning zoo and verandas looking beyond the campers to the hills and bush of a national park.