"Put out the cat and turn off the
town when you leave please."

Sherrie and Marty Adams are just about the
last to leave Warrego. Sherrie looks back on
her time in this shrinking mining town.
Paul Cockram asked a few questions ...

What's it like travelling with a roving manager who gets posted here, there and everywhere?
I think when I met him eighteen years ago, I had no comprehension of what a mining engineer did. I'd always lived in the city and I just thought that he would do a job and we'd stay put like most of our friends. Nine or ten moves later I've come to realise that that's not the case.
It's very challenging. It's make or break of a marriage and a relationship. I think that's a really big factor. We, as a family, have tried always to establish that we would move as a family.
So, where the job has permitted that it's not 'fly in fly out' or where there has been a choice, we've actually chosen to move to the site rather than for the boys and I to stay somewhere else and for him to fly in and fly out. We thought that the family unit was really important.
So, how has it been, living with your children in a place like Warrego?
Well, having said that, we've only had one child here out of our three, through circumstances. Our eldest stayed in New Zealand because he was in his final years of schooling and it didn't seem appropriate to move him here at that point of his education. So, we came with two and one has been at the Warrego primary school where he was the only non-indigenous child there. I think that worked quite well for him.
The other one spent a year here at Tennant Creek High School and, at the time, Warrego still had a lot of children, so we felt the children could have a social life out here and academically, they were running OK. As the town has gotten smaller and smaller and there were no children we decided that, for our middle child anyway, he needed more extension academically and more extension socially. So, he's gone down to St Phillips this year.
So, that's been hard. I'm travelling now with only one of three children so, from a mother's point of view, I'm not very happy about it; but it's one of the down sides of being a mobile family.
The difficulty is that the education system doesn't have parity. So, whether we move from New Zealand to here or interstate within Australia we are constantly confronted with where the children are at academically, what grade they are, because of different standards from place to place.
What's Warrego been like over the past year?
The town at the moment is really quiet, obviously. When I arrived here eighteen months ago there were probably over a hundred people here. And of that there were probably twenty-odd kids. It was very social then, there was a big sporting thrust.
At any given time there'd be touch rugby, waterpolo, tennis, darts competitions, pool/billiards. You had the walkers, the nightly walkers that would exercise, the gym was quite busy, lots of people doing gym work.
So, in the last year it has just wound down incredibly and now there's about eight of us live out here permanently. All those sorts of things have gone which is a bit sad.
For me personally though, we knew that this was going to happen, so it's not like I walked into it and it just happened overnight. It's been a progression of goodbyes, which has been sad. For the most part the people who have left have left knowing that was their fate and they've had time to make other contingency plans which has been really good. But the saying goodbye has been really difficult and to watch the town go, from my experience, from a hundred-odd people down to eight is hard.
My trees have kept me here. I like the fact that we live with no neighbours looking over our fences. I like the fact that the child that lives with us and our dogs can roam free. We have a quality of life here that some people would find odd in that it is very peaceful, very quiet, very pretty. I think that Warrego is incredibly pretty and at the moment, with all the rain of course, it's very green and that contrasts nicely with the incredible sunsets we get here.
I have no desire to move into town for those reasons. There are plenty of reasons why it would be more convenient. I currently work in town part time so I'm in and out four days a week now. But the lifestyle of the solitude and the option of being here is one that I've made quite happily.
And the school's still going…
The school is still going and really the credit for that goes to the school teachers. Colin and Sandra Baker have been hugely involved in keeping our school open.
Colin was the appointed school teacher and Sandra works part time there for him in an administration role and teacher support. They were very aware that the school numbers were dwindling quickly and the Education Department has a policy that you must have, I think it's ten on the roll on a regular basis.
The only way he was ever going to substantiate that number as the Warrego community depleted was to encourage the Munglawarra community children to come in. So, he has canvassed and got a vehicle and he goes out every morning and picks up those children, troops them into school. We've bought uniforms for them or the school has found funds to do that so that everyone is dressed alike, which is really good.
He's put a program which is a broader education program which somewhat reflects the needs of a more indigenous school. They do horsemanship and horse riding three or four times a week, they swim every day and he now buses them into the Swimming Club on Friday nights in town. And they're having an opportunity to compete with town kids and I will say they're doing very well. The town kids have had a bit of a shake up. Colin has decided that it's really important to do that for that community.
We elected, in consultation with Colin and with our son Christopher, to leave him at the Warrego Primary School. We have a faith in what Colin's doing and we think it's really good for Christopher to have this opportunity.
He won't get that with any other move we are likely to make. I don't think he'll ever have the opportunity to be so closely involved with a different culture. And to be privy to it and to be accepted into it, rather than him being the majority he's by far the minority. And I think he's getting a lot from that, I think it's a really important thing. I don't know that he understands that at this stage. I don't think he sees it that way but in hindsight and on reflection this is a really interesting thing for him to be subjected to.
So, the school's doing well.