Outback students create song with award-winning country musician

Children from Western Australia's remote Pilbara have swapped pencils for a microphone to share a taste of rural education through a country song.

The School of the Air students collaborated with award-winning Australian country musician Josh Arnold to produce Kids from the Pilbara.

The group gathered on Yarrie Station, a 250,000-hectare cattle operation about 1,500 kilometres north of Perth, to record the song and accompanying music video.

While learning in a classroom surrounded by peers is a normal experience for most Australian students, it is relatively out of the ordinary for station children like nine-year-old Tanami Fox-Coppin.

Tanami is one of 21 students who attend Port Hedland's School of the Air, the institution providing distance education to students across the Pilbara's vast interior.

"We go on the computer and do [school] and we do our schoolwork with our governess in our school room next to the offices at the station, and under a tree, at lots of different places in the bush," she said.

"There are all the online lessons, and all the fun activities we get to do."

Tanami usually sees her school friends just three times a year. 

So naturally, she was excited when her classmates spent two days camping at her family's property to film the music video.

"[I am] really happy, because we never get to see any of our friends," she said.

Sense of pride

The song is the latest of more than 400 Arnold has recorded with rural and remote students across Australia.

The Toowoomba musician, who shared a Golden Guitar with Lee Kernaghan for their 2001 cover of Thank God I'm A Country Boy, has been working on similar creative projects for more than 15 years.

"[It gives them] a bit of pride in their school and who they are as station kids," he said.

Arnold grew up on a sheep and wheat farm, close to Tara, a small town in Queensland's Western Downs region. 

He has travelled to every state and territory in Australia on a mission to give country kids a voice. 

"I was one of them once and I would have loved the opportunity to sing about where I grew up and my school," he said.  

"People all around Australia and the world are going to watch it and hear it.

"It's just a really special thing." 

The music video provides a glimpse of station life in the Pilbara. 

"The kids have been down at the creek riding horses, a few motorbikes, singing around the homestead, a little campfire singalong," Arnold said.

"These guys get together, and they haven't seen each other for a fair while, so it's party time."

School in the bush

Tanami's mother and Yarrie Station owner, Annabelle Coppin, said activities like making the music video made a difference to the students' attitudes towards school.

"It's sometimes hard for the kids because they're not in a classroom so you don't have that kind of peer support and they sometimes wonder why they're there."

She said School of the Air was "vital" for families who lived in the bush and said it had great benefits, like being more flexible and personalised than mainstream school.

Typically, the teacher-to-student ratio is higher, and each student has a parent or governess who guides them from home. 

But Ms Coppin said it came with challenges too. 

"It's a very costly and timely; there's a huge amount more effort required to educate kids in the bush versus sending them to a normal town school," she said.

"Emotionally it can be tricky because your kids are also under pressure learning from parents or a governess who they know really well so they act differently compared to being with a teacher."

School of the Air was established in Alice Springs in 1951.

It was the first time students could attend school from remote properties using real-time communication.

Ms Coppin did School of the Air from Yarrie Station too and she said it had changed considerably.

Her children video call their teachers from a computer instead of using an old "scratchy" radio.

"It was like a VHR radio; we had to share it with the RFDS [Royal Flying Doctor's Service] so if there was an emergency we had to stop for a bit and listen to what was going on with the emergency, get a few doctors' tips, and then go back to school," Ms Coppin said.

"We used to have 30 minutes a day with the teacher and, to be honest, it was more of a social interaction."

But one thing remains the same.

"Kids just being with kids is lifelong memories and something that will stay with them forever," she said.