The Place Beyond The Pines

Updated

Growing up strong in one of Victoria's most disadvantaged postcodes.

To grow up in Frankston North is to know nobody expects much from you.

A place where it can be easier to take a job at McDonald's than pursue a career.

Even the notion of a career is beyond the field of view for many young people here.

Each morning Akang Akang's mother cups her palm over the crown of his head and says a prayer before her son leaves the house.

"I'm the youngest and she saw a lot of my friends — used to be friends — how they turned out and she's kind of scared for me.

"She doesn't want me in jail or on the street."

At 17, staying out of trouble has been a daily manoeuvre for Akang.

To ignore the racist taunts in the street. To elude other African kids who give him a hard time for going to school. Even the bus driver who misses the stop when he sees who's pressed the buzzer. You've got to rise above on a daily, hourly basis.

The Pines

They call it The Pines, an enclave of ex-housing commission homes nestled between forests and seaside, 38 kilometres south-east of Melbourne. Bounded by a golf course, a flora and fauna reserve and a major freeway, it's an area listed as one of the most disadvantaged in the state in the 2015 Dropping Off The Edge report, which compares locations around the country.

High rates of unemployment, criminal convictions and disability combine with low education, child maltreatment, family violence and psychiatric admissions to make adolescence an obstacle course, degree of difficulty high.

Add in being Sudanese and it's a minor miracle that Akang is about to graduate with plans to become a park ranger.

"It's actually pretty difficult especially nowadays with all this gang-related stuff going around," he says.

"There are the people who want good things in life, and careers and then there are also the troublemakers. I was sort of in the middle and I would sometimes hang out with each. I looked at the way they were living their lives, my other friends, and looked at where they were starting to go and I was like: that kind of lifestyle is not for me. I'm not comfortable at all doing those sorts of things.

"It's, 'Let's go to Northside and start trouble with the Northside guys.' Fighting. Or, 'Let's gatecrash this party that's happening on whatever day, I don't like the guy that's hosting it.'

"It's the same routine every weekend. The police come, you get locked up, your mum comes. There's literally no point."

Australian? Sudanese?

Akang was five when his mother brought him and his siblings to Australia via Libya and Egypt.

His older brother Yohana is now a laboratory technician at St Vincent's Hospital. His sister works in childcare. Two other brothers are managers at Woolworths, one in Frankston and one in Alice Springs.

Though he's been here 12 years, Akang doesn't consider himself Australian.

"No-one ever says I'm Australian so I don't think I'm Australian. I did grow up here. But I'm Sudanese."

The neighbourhood doesn't let him forget he wasn't born here.

There's any number of examples Akang can pull from his memory bank.

Like the other day, when he was walking down the street with his mates.

"In my good friend group we have three Australian people and four Sudanese people so we're pretty multicultural. This guy's filling up his petrol and he yells out, 'Oh you Apex predators!' or something. I thought 'What?' We stopped and to my white friends, he was like, 'Haven't you seen the news? I can't believe you're hanging around with them. You better watch out'.

"If you had one of those trouble-making friendship groups that situation would have ended badly. I know it would have because I've seen it happen. But we just walked away. You've just got to learn to accept things."

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'Show them the world'

"Show them the world" is what Susan Bollard was asked to do when she got the job at Monterey Secondary College a year ago.

Initially, a group of parents wanted her sacked. For teaching the kids how to send emails.

"I wanted them to write an email introducing themselves so that I knew if they went for jobs they had that kind of elevator pitch.

"Some parents went to the principal and they went to the regional office of the Education Department to complain about this really crazy teacher who had the cheek to want the students to write emails. The families these kids come from, they don't send emails. They text people, they Facebook people, they talk face-to-face because they've got no credit on their phones. But they don't send and receive business emails."

57 per cent of adults in Frankston North have no educational qualifications.

It means that while many parents are very supportive, many others ascribe little value to education.

"Those parents would be more than happy for their children to sit at home, wag school, not be involved in things. So when I get these students in year 11 and 12, many of them have not gone on excursions that have been offered to them over the years. There's not the parental support or there's parental suspicion about, 'Well, why do you want to go and see that? What's that got to do with you? How's that going to help you?'"

'A suburb with a lack of confidence in itself' is how Susan Bollard has come to understand Frankston North.

'A compulsive teacher'

Fortunately, Bollard describes herself as a compulsive teacher with a specialty in wrangling teenagers.

Not to be deterred, she aimed even higher.

She wooed Parks Victoria to create a program that saw students adopt a swathe of local bushland and work alongside rangers to care for it.

At first, the kids were reluctant to go outside at all.

"They had to wear heavy boots, heavy pants, long sleeves, high visibility tops and a hat. That was quite anathema to what a lot of them were prepared to accept.

"They said, 'Why do we have to go out and do weeding?' but we insisted and it didn't take very long."

They studied wildlife with night vision cameras, came to understand fuel loads by using moisture metres.

It was the Parks program that set Akang on a path to a career.

"I can remember Akang saying to me on one of his first days out in the park, 'Do these rangers get paid for doing this?' and I said, 'Yes, it's their job'.

"He was just incredulous that you could have that much fun and be paid for it."

Akang is the kind of student a teacher dreams of.

The kind of student who turns up to school sopping wet because the bus didn't come and he had to stand on the side of the road in the rain to wait for the next one.

Since his exposure to the Parks program, he's applied for the summer ranger program and won a fully funded scholarship, one of only two nationally, to go on an Earthwatch expedition to South Australia. There, he worked alongside world-calibre scientists to monitor habitat and water quality in the Murray River.

It was an achievement Ms Bollard (pictured above) contacted the media about at the time. There was zero interest.

"It was all very well to put 'Apex' all over the front of the local papers but a story about an African boy doing well, making good — it wasn't newsworthy enough."

'Not worth considering'

It's enough to break a teacher's heart.

Ms Bollard once took her students on an excursion to a suburban shopping centre. The idea was to give them experience dealing with an unfamiliar environment.

"The first thing that happened was the police bailed them up and wanted to know what they were doing there and wanted their names and addresses. It completely undermined what I was trying to do for the day in confidence building and reinforced for them how people stereotype them and make those sorts of assumptions. That, in Akang's case, because he's African, Africans do bad stuff."

"I just want to scream sometimes and say, 'These are fantastic kids. Just give them a go'."

It's not unusual for Ms Bollard to spend her evenings trawling for opportunities for her students. She often hits brick walls.

"I was at a local meeting of Frankston businesspeople, looking for work placement situations for our VCAL (Victorian Certificate of Applied Learning) students from Monterey to broaden their horizons. After I'd spoken a number of people said, 'When we get applications and we see postcode 3200, a lot of the time we don't even bother to read them' .

"I was quite shocked that they had just been so dismissive of people from this area. They'd stereotyped them and it was just, 'OK, if you come from that area you must be no-hopers so not even worth considering'."

Breanna

A year ago Breanna Aliimatafitati was struggling to make it to school on a regular basis.

Now she's about to become the first person in her family to graduate high school.

"Breanna is one impressive young woman," says Ms Bollard, who came to learn the reason for her absences was that she was caring for her mother, whose kidneys were failing after she was diagnosed with bladder cancer.

"It's been kind of a rough run," says Breanna, softly spoken but composed and articulate. "Deep down it's really hard. You don't really like thinking about it. But my mum's a really strong lady. She's like my superhero. She still works and she's still pushing on."

When her mother moved to Werribee in search of better job prospects, Breanna moved in first with her aunt and cousins ("It's so funny because every day was a new adventure with how many there were of us in the house.") and then came to stay with her father and his partner, where she sleeps in a thin-walled caravan in the front yard.

"I can't believe she gets to school looking crisp and lovely in her uniform," marvels Ms Bollard.

"It's where you'd want to throw up your hands and say, 'Look, why do I want to come to school? Why do I want to write an essay? Why do I want to read a novel? Life is just too hard'."

"I did want to give up at one point," admits Breanna. "But everyone was like, 'Come on Breanna, just finish the last year'.

Along with Akang, Breanna's been one of the student leaders of the Parks project. She was one of the first in the class to memorize the Latin names of the plants they were encountering.

For Susan Bollard, that's the power of the practical, experiential approach of the VCAL program, which offers an alternate pathway for year 11 and 12 students.

"If I said a year ago, 'Let's study a bit of Latin', that would have been, 'In your dreams, Miss...'"

Elecia

Elecia Schenken sits at the kitchen counter quietly sipping from a steaming mug.

It's 7am and the house is silent around her.

There are apples and oranges in the fruit bowl. A dining table with chairs neatly tucked in. Spotless benchtops.

It's the largest, calmest place she's ever called home.

Around this time of the morning she used to argue, like clockwork, with her father.

Until recently she was living with him and her mother. Though her parents were no longer a couple, they were all crammed into a cabin where Elecia slept half in the kitchen, half in the entryway.

It was through her church youth leader that she came to live in this supported accommodation run by the Salvation Army.

"It's hard because I don't get to see my mum everyday but it's pretty good. It's a lot safer and more relaxing. I get motivated now. My housemates, they're not lazy people so it gets me in the mood of doing stuff."

Though she's most comfortable inside styling hair — Elecia works in a salon one day a week — she has warmed to the Parks program.

"It feels good to get out there and be in the environment and helping."

She's dreaming of a future that involves a good job and a house with some friends.

Maybe she'll move away.

"I feel like I want to get away from this area because I've been here for so long … but then I've been here for so long that I'm used to it.

"People who don't live in The Pines, they usually just think we're all dropkicks and that everyone does drugs and we're all alcoholics or something, and all live off the dole.

"If you tell them you walk through The Pines at night they'll be like, 'What? And you're not stabbed yet?'

"Maybe I'll move a little bit away so I'm still close to here."

Unearthed

That the kids are dreaming big and becoming ambitious marks a dramatic transformation. Controversial, even.

The average dad in Frankston North might be a fencer. Mum might work nights as a cleaner at a hotel. Shelf stacking at the supermarket. The more affluent parents might have a trade and own their own business, apprenticeships at year 10 having offered a way out of poverty for some.

For the rest, it can be a hand-to-mouth existence. You pay the rent, you pay your bills. You do a fantastic job of getting by.

For the younger generation it cultivates a constrained view of what's possible.

When Ms Bollard originally told her VCAL students they could go to university, a year tenner bailed her up in the corridor.

"She was very adamant that I shouldn't be inflating expectations. 'Everyone knows that's not going to happen,' she said."

One of the biggest challenges students here encounter is a lack of access to technology.

Monterey Secondary College has a bring-your-own-device policy, meaning students have to supply their own computer.

For many it means homework, research, everything is done on a mobile phone, often small and outdated. The screen might be cracked and credit will almost certainly be sporadic.

Without access to cars, many don't experience the world outside The Pines. When the time comes to get your driver's licence, there is no family vehicle to learn on.

"They work hard for life, these kids," says Ms Bollard.

It's something Parks Victoria ranger Bill Mallinson, too, has been impressed by as he's worked with the kids.

"They've had to grow up more quickly than I did," he says. "Taking on more responsibilities at a younger age. The conservative boys private school environment in which I grew up no doubt gave me access to the world of the "haves", as well as an expectation that society would support me to do anything I wanted.

"The Monterey students don't see themselves as disadvantaged but they don't have that same sense of possibility and expectation."

As the rangers have crouched in the dirt with the students, they've been regenerating more than the bush.

The future

Akang's bedroom wall and the inside of his cupboard are plastered with inspirational quotes.

"Quotes get you to question how you're living.

"I don't want to just do things without thinking. I want to think about it, really think about it, and then make my decision."

Five years from now he sees himself working outdoors, maybe in parks management. French Island or Wilson's Promontory. Grampians National Park.

Where Breanna once seemed headed for a job in a pet shop, she's now tossing up between park rangering and vet nursing.

Her teacher suspects Elecia might consider youth work as well as hair dressing.

As for Ms Bollard? There are many more kids in Frankston North.

Topics: education, community-and-society, family-and-children, youth, environment, social-policy, teachers, parenting, frankston-north-3200, frankston-3199, melbourne-3000, vic

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