Three years ago, a community on South Australia's Eyre Peninsula lost one of its own. Simon Baccanello, a teacher at Elliston Area School, disappeared following a shark attack off the local coastline. His body was never recovered. For the students and staff he left behind, the grief has never fully resolved. But grief, when it finds the right channel, can become something else entirely.
This year, a group of Elliston Area School students decided to transform that loss into movement, quite literally. The students have taken on a 720-kilometre relay run as a tribute to their former teacher, covering a distance that speaks to the scale of what Baccanello meant to the people who knew him.
Elliston sits on the far west of the Eyre Peninsula, a remote stretch of South Australian coastline where tight-knit communities absorb loss differently than larger cities might. When a teacher disappears in circumstances as sudden and unresolved as these, the wound stays open. For students who may have been in Baccanello's classroom, or simply knew him as a fixture of their school and town, the absence is felt in ways that are hard to articulate but easy to honour through action.
The relay itself is a physically demanding undertaking for young people, particularly across the distances involved in this part of regional South Australia. That difficulty, those involved would likely say, is part of the point. Endurance, community effort, and the willingness to push through discomfort are, in many ways, the values a good teacher tries to instil.
Schools in regional and remote Australia carry a particular weight when it comes to community cohesion. A teacher in a place like Elliston is rarely just a classroom figure; they are a coach, a mentor, a familiar face at the local oval and the town oval. The South Australian Department for Education has long recognised that attracting and retaining quality teachers in remote communities is one of the more persistent challenges facing the state system, and it is partly because of the outsized role those teachers play that their loss lands so heavily.
The research on grief and school communities suggests that structured, collective acts of remembrance help students process loss in healthy ways. The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare has documented the particular vulnerability of young people in regional areas to the cumulative effects of community trauma, and schools are often the primary institution through which that trauma is acknowledged and worked through.
What the students of Elliston Area School are doing, then, is not simply a memorial run. It is an act of communal healing, one that keeps a person's name spoken aloud and places his story in the legs and lungs of the young people he once taught. For a man whose body was never recovered, there is something quietly profound about students choosing to carry him forward through physical effort rather than silence.
The shark attack that claimed Baccanello is a reminder, too, of the risks that come with living and working close to the ocean in regional coastal Australia. The issue of shark interactions along Australian coastlines remains a subject of ongoing scientific monitoring and community concern, particularly in areas where people swim, surf, and fish as part of daily life rather than recreation alone.
Teachers who choose regional postings accept a life woven deeply into the community they serve. Simon Baccanello was, by all accounts, exactly that kind of teacher. The 720 kilometres his students are running in his honour suggest they understood, even at a young age, just how much he gave. That understanding is, in its own way, the best possible tribute to a life in education.
For anyone watching from outside Elliston, the relay is a prompt to consider what teachers in remote and regional communities quietly carry, and what communities lose when those teachers are gone. The students running this relay have already learned one of the more important lessons their school could offer: that when words fall short, you lace up your shoes and you run.