ABSTRACT
Educational researchers are not necessarily going to recognize themselves as sharing that ‘ballad of yearning’, which though very familiar as a topic in English language fictional and autobiographical writing, seems remote from the inner city school on a wet Friday. It may also be a gendered ‘yearning’: although some women, such as Freya Stark, Gertrude Bell and Jane Goodall, certainly had it too. I am using that lyrical description of an idealized research site metaphorically, to suggest that good fieldwork on an interesting topic should be a desirable goal because it produces original ideas when it is done, and that is how scholars ‘make their names’. Impediments to good fieldwork can seem as impossible as that blue mountain, and educational researchers certainly want to find the unsullied teaching and learning that is the equivalent to the Australian outback or the Sahara.
