Cruel denial of a boarder crossing

In the same week Melbourne’s Western Bulldogs arrived to play a game of football, a 12-year-old primary school boarder is crying herself to sleep.

Lilly Anderson, a boarder at Adelaide’s Loreto College, wants to spend holidays on her family’s NSW farm. Picture: Roy Van Der Vegt

In the same week Melbourne’s Western Bulldogs arrived in South Australia to play a game of football, a 12-year-old primary school boarder is crying herself to sleep at an Adelaide college wondering when she will next be allowed to see her parents on their remote sheep property in far western New South Wales.

In her very first year as a boarder at Adelaide’s Loreto College, Lillian Anderson is the human face of the bureaucratic sloth and political indifference that has left remote country parents separated from their small children at interstate boarding schools amid border closures.

While special exemptions are found for footy players and movie stars, parents such as Britt and Mick Anderson have instead had to fend for themselves with phone calls to SA Health’s lukewarm 1800 “hotline” and hitting refresh on their inbox every five minutes to see if some anonymous bureaucrat has bothered to reply.

The process started on August 2 when they sought permission to pick up their daughter, Lilly, from Loreto in Adelaide so she could spend the October school holidays with her parents and sister on their 3820 sqkm property two hours northeast of Broken Hill.

Amid deplorable silence from the state’s politicians about the case, the family have been given a range of answers and non-answers, from a straight no to convoluted maybes to advice that they could only enter if they abandoned the farm and quarantined for two weeks in SA, then returned to NSW, with Lilly then forced to do the first two weeks of term four via remote learning in isolation without her parents back in Adelaide.

The situation has prompted searing condemnation from Loreto College principal Nicole Archard, who has eight boarders under her care from NSW, Victoria, and some very young Indigenous students from the NT whose parents have been told previously they would need to take two weeks off work and quarantine with their children in Howard Springs if they left SA. “I call them the forgotten children of the pandemic,” Dr Archard told The Weekend Australian.

“If Lilly went back to the farm she would be the most socially distanced person in the country. And of course if these students were footballers, that would be fine, they would be crossing the border. Because they are children they don’t have a voice.”

Lilly has found her voice for this article, telling The Weekend Australian that while she is enjoying her first year as a boarder after previously learning via the School of the Air, she really misses home.

Lilly Anderson, a boarder at Adelaide’s Loreto College, wants to spend holidays on her family’s NSW farm.

She has not seen her parents since July nor her sister, Ivy, who is 10 and studying Year 5 over the airwaves.

“There isn’t just one thing I miss about home,” she said.

“I miss everything, my family, my animals, being out in the paddock, the freedom and the wide open spaces. I would love to be there for the holidays. I know Mum and Dad are lamb marking, and I always enjoy that. Especially being out in the paddock mustering on my motorbike. I want to go down to the creek with my dog, Daisy, and visit our favourite tree, we pretend it’s a cubby and spend hours there.”

Lilly says she loves Loreto but has struggled to adjust to the traffic noise at night after the silence of the farm. “I have made some friends and all the teachers and boarding ladies are lovely, but it will never compare to being home. I know I have to be here, but I miss home so much.”

Asked if there was one thing she could say to SA Health, she replied: “Please, I need to go home. Please let me.”

Britt describes her daughter as “a proper little bushie” and says she and Mick are worried about the impact of her being away from the farm for so long.

“She just needs to be here. We have said to her that no matter what it takes, we are going to get her home. Her happy place is doing sheep work. She loves being on the motorbike mustering the sheep. It’s family time for us.”

To use an AFL-ism, the Andersons have created a virus-proof “sterile corridor” – the term used by the footy supremos and their enablers in the bureaucracy for the safe movement of footy players – to enter SA and retrieve their daughter without infecting anyone.

They have told SA Health, repeatedly, that they are both fully vaccinated and Covid-free and could drive from their farm to Loreto with a full tank of juice, make the journey without stopping, pick Lill up from the Portrush Rd school and be back at the farm in time for dinner. Even with that cast-iron reassurance the proposal was vetoed.

Loreto College is urging governments to become more involved in these cases and for the bureaucracy to take a more thoughtful and considered approach. “We are talking here about a very young child. We have lost our understanding of what it is to be a commonwealth,” Dr Archard said.