There, the inhabitants live far removed from the luxuries of modern Australia.

There are no shops: food is sourced from hunting kangaroos, camels, and wild pigs, and from what can be grown in the inhospitable desert sands.

The doctor’s office is a shipping container, staffed about once a week by travelling nurses, and there are no police or ambulances that access the town.

The outskirts are intersected by two rivers, and in the wet season, flooding separates the residents from the rest of Western Australia. At times it is battered by cyclones, with supplies airlifted in by emergency services. 

Families sleep dozens of children to a room, with adults found camping out by the riverbank, under trees, or in abandoned old cars.  

And for four years, it was the home of Launceston couple Anita and Andrew Ramage, who lived and worked in the community’s school. 

“Before we moved out, I wouldn’t have dreamed there were people living in Australia the way that these folks are living out there,” said Mr Ramage. 

“There’s not a lot of opportunities out there for them, but they … I used to think it was a bad situation. 

“But once you live with them for a few years, they’re pretty lucky. They’ve got a good lifestyle.”

The experience of teaching in the community had so little in common with a teaching role in a typical Australian school, that it barely seems right to use the same word.

In Warralong, working in the school was a 24-hour job. Anita Ramage, with her teaching qualifications, was the catalyst for their move to the Pilbara, while Andrew helped out with tutoring and other jobs, as well as documenting their experiences for Australian Outback Photography. But in a community where the children significantly outnumber the adults, the school provides so much more than an education curriculum. 

“There will be a dozen, fifteen kids living in one house without any parents,” Mr Ramage said. 

“There’s very few adults out there. It’s just the way they’re brought up, in the desert. The parents obviously give birth to their kids, and then give their kids to aunties, uncles, brothers, or sisters to raise.

“So the school basically brings them up, feeds them, educates them, plays with them, amuses them, and that’s from kinder right through to grade 12.”

The East Pilbara, the local council area that Warralong falls within, is five times bigger than the state of Tasmania. At 380,000 square kilometres, the shire is impossibly vast. Much of it is a law unto itself. 

There are elders in the community, aged about 70 or 75, that remember being among the first of their people to see white Australians. Many still do not speak fluent English, and told their stories to the Ramage’s with the help of multi-lingual students. 

Working in an entirely different culture presented its own challenges, and opportunities, when it came to education. It was vital for the teachers to strike a balance between the ‘blackfella’ and the ‘whitefella’ approach. 

“All the old people in the community, they’re very sad to think that the kids might lose their identity,” said Mr Ramage. 

“That’s why when we teach them at the school, you can’t just teach them the whitefella way, because that’s not what the old people want them taught.

“They want what would be taught in school in Sydney or Perth, but they also very much want the traditional education.”

Most children that grow up in Warralong do not leave. 

Some are employed by the school as adults; as cooks, tutors, or tradespeople.

The Ramage’s attitude was that they had to impart skills that would be useful in the lives the children were actually likely to lead. 

School days would be taken up by a combination of maths, literacy and science, and “on-country learning.” The teachers would pile the students into a 4WD and head out, with community elders, into the desert. 

There, the Ramage’s, along with the children, learned the traditional knowledge that has enabled the Pilbara Aboriginal community to make a home in one of the world’s harshest environments for generations.

“Their only ambition is to stay and live and work on their own land, and survive the way their parents and grandparents and forefathers have, for 60,000 years,” said Mr Ramage.

On frequent occasions, boys from the community have been approached by football club scouts, travelling the 1557 kilometres from Perth.

But in almost every case, the boys turn their backs on the potential to make millions and play for big-name teams, and return home.

“They might be all excited for a day or two and pack their bags to go to Perth, but they’re back within a week or two normally,” Mr Ramage said.

“They just don’t want to be out there. This is their ancestral country, and they just want to stay on their country.”

After four years in Warralong, the Ramage’s have left Western Australia. 

They have traded places with their daughter and her partner, who are now teaching in the same community after hearing about Andrew and Anita’s experiences. 

For Mr Ramage, there have been some hiccups in settling back into his normal life. Traffic rules, for one thing. And the presence of the law in general. 

“Out there, there’s no restrictions,” he said. “You just survive, and live your own life. We really miss where we’ve come from, and what we’ve learned. But as much as we loved it over there, we realised we couldn't stay forever.”

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