Sarah Donnelley’s book Big Things Grow has been called a love song to a small country town but it is also a love song to the profession of teaching.

Sarah was an early career teacher when she left Sydney to take up a teaching post in the north western NSW town of Wilcannia. Her beautifully written memoir recounts key events of her four fulfilling years working in what was a complex and challenging environment.

Written more as a collection of stand-alone stories separated by chapters than a chronological order of events, Big Things Grow takes readers inside Sarah’s life both in and out of the classroom as she shares her thoughts and experiences of teaching in an Indigenious community.

Sarah shares how she learnt to engage and connect better with her Aboriginal students by modifying her behaviour and language, and the benefits that came from taking students out on Country. Gaining trust as a newcomer was something Sarah had to tackle head on and her teaching techniques form an extremely useful ‘toolbox’ of ideas for other teachers trying to break out of the conventional teaching mould.

Sarah also reinforces the message that “education is a business of relationships” and that, like any relationship, there are both highs and lows.

With connection and community being a strong and constant theme Sarah provides readers with thought-provoking insights into the issues and challenges facing the Wilcannia community during her time there.  The lack of access to fresh drinking water and many basic services, the less than optimal living conditions, the importance of the Darling River and Sorry Business are all topics that appear in this book.

The arrival of Covid-19 certainly takes centre stage later in the book and Sarah’s words add a human face to what many of us only heard about via media reports in regards to the pandemic’s impact on Indigenious communities.  Faced with reduced food access and with members of large and extended families trying to isolate when they had nowhere else to go, Sarah notes that remote living, pre-Covid, had already been like “living in ‘iso’ all year round”.

And, any teacher who worked during the period of online learning and take home learning packs will relate to the extra workload, the complications and the decreased connection that the pandemic caused, all of which were magnified for Sarah.

But it was the pandemic that saw Sarah turn to music as a way of connecting her students and community and her rework of the words to Paul Kelly and Kev Carmody’s iconic song “From Little Things Big Things Grow” did exactly what the song title suggests.

Used as the anthem for a unique initiative, Sarah unrolled hundreds of metres of tape as she drove through town delivering learning packs while getting each child to hold a section of tape as she went. The result was that Sarah literally connected the town and the video of the event quickly went viral.

While this book was no doubt prompted into being by her subsequent win of the 2020 ARIA Award for Music Teacher of the Year, it is not the book’s focus. Yes, the award opened many doors but it also opened Sarah to criticism by factions in the Wilcannia community who saw her as a Tall Poppy. Thankfully Sarah was brave enough to include both the positive and negative impacts of the award in her book.

But at the heart of Big Things Grow is the town and Sarah paints a loving picture of how she feels about Wilcannia, its landscape and its people: “This red dirt, it takes hold of you. The blue skies, the sunsets, the starry nights, the river… Country holds onto you.”

I’ve never been to Wilcannia but through reading this book, I feel like I have. Through Sarah’s story I see it just as she explains in the book –  a small town with a big heart; a town that, from the outside, looks like a ghost town but one that comes to life when you become part of the community.

But I also see this book as a valuable record of historic importance as it documents life and education in a small remote town.

A worthy read for educators or those wanting to make a difference through empowerment, listening and respect.

Author: Sarah Donnelley
Publisher: Allen & Unwin
ISBN: 9781761065354
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This book review is supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.