Like many other eight-year-olds, Jake Hawkes absolutely loves trucks.
Luckily for him, home is in the grain and sheep farming district of Lameroo in South Australia's Mallee, where trucks are always rolling by.
For this country kid, it's the best place on earth.
"I can hear trucks from ages away and I can tell what truck it is," Jake says.
"I know what exhaust they have, and the engine, because some trucks have different engines."
The tight-knit community of Lameroo is home to about 800 people.
But for Jake, it's much more than just a hometown. It's also his classroom.
Traditional school setting challenges
The adventurous and spirited youngster is autistic, has attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and dyslexia.
He's one of more than 43,000 Australian students who are homeschooled because mainstream schooling doesn't meet his sometimes complex needs.
Jake was living in Tailem Bend, about an hour east of Adelaide, when he started school.
His mum Rachael Hawkes says he had a rough start.
"He struggled with the difference of kindy and school, where kindy you can go in and out, and school you need to sit at a table," she says.
"He'd be screaming and pulling away and the front office would be holding him in.
"It was just awful. It was so emotional."
Homeschooling a safe environment
He began homeschooling with his mum and grandmother Jody Hall, who's also neurodivergent, in August last year.
"If he's in an environment where he's safe, feels calmer in his own time and can have lots of breaks, he just takes off with his learning," Ms Hawkes says.
That safe environment has been in Lameroo.
The local cafe has become Jake's base for learning mathematics, English, and everything in-between and beyond.
Jake's family made the move to the tiny rural town from Tailem Bend after friends and fellow neurodivergent family, Sarah and Nathan Chapman, bought the Lameroo Country Kitchen late last year.
Ms Hawkes works in the cafe while Jake's grandmother, who has a diploma in early childhood education, is a support worker for one of the Chapman's children.
"It's quite a village with home education," Ms Hall says.
"They're extremely supportive here at the cafe and we could not do this without them."
There's no bakery in town so the cafe is packed every day.
"We've been open now for just over eight months and we have not had a chance to stop it's been so busy, which is great," cafe owner Ms Chapman says.
"The community here has been so welcoming to our family with our various disabilities, I've never felt somewhere so much like home."
Rural isolation
Like many rural districts, Lameroo is isolated from major health services.
Locals have to wait a long time or travel hundreds of kilometres to access occupational therapists, speech pathologists and psychologists.
But in this community, people have each other's back.
"The coffee shop is the heart of the town," Ms Chapman says.
"We want to make sure our place is somewhere safe that people can come in and have a chat."
At the cafe, Jake mingles with regular customers and visitors, young and old.
"Locals ask him, 'What are you learning today, Jake?' They know who he is," Ms Hall says.
"Here the people look out for each other."
At Jake's homeschool, there are no bells or structured lessons.
"Jake shops at the grocery store and that's part of the home education as well, to develop life skills," Ms Hall says.
"He knows the ladies and the gents there and they have a great rapport, which has built his confidence."
School refusal
Jake is one of the hundreds of Australian children who experience school refusal, for whom the school environment is too emotionally overwhelming.
With help from the Lameroo community, he's found a way to love learning.
"When Jake left school he was in year 2 and he couldn't read a story or read anything," Ms Hawkes says.
"But now he can read and he can type."
As for Jake's future, he'll continue following his interests.
"When I grow up I want to be a truck driver," he says.
"I can load my truck with a lot of stuff and I can have confidence that I'm not going to tip it."
Jake is overjoyed when he sees a B-double, semi-trailer or livestock carrier move through Lameroo.
To him, there's nothing better than a rumbling engine and a loud honk.
"I really believe that Jake will be a truck driver. His dad Chris is a truck driver, his whole life is around it," Ms Hall says.
"When the silos are filling up the trucks he'll just stand and watch that and tell me about what they're doing.
"He's got lots of areas we can build on and that's because he wants to learn."
Watch this story on ABC TV's Landline at 12:30pm on Sunday, or on iview.
