What we discovered when our daughter unplugged for a school year

SYDNEY The handwritten letters from our 13-year-old daughter sit on our coffee table in a clear plastic folder.

- Damien Cave

With their drawings of pink flowers and long paragraphs marked with underlined and crossed-out words, they are an abridged, analogue version of her spirited personality - and a way for my wife, Diana, and me to keep her close as we watch TV and fiddle with our mobile phones.

They would not exist, of course, if Amelia were home with us in Sydney.

But she is hundreds of kilometres away at a uniquely Australian school in the bush, where she is spending her whole ninth-grade school year without the Internet, a phone, a computer or even a camera with a screen.

Here in Australia, a growing number of respected schools lock up smart everything for months.

They make tap-and-swipe teens learn, play and communicate only through real-life interaction or words scrawled on the page.

"What a gift this is," we told Amelia, when she was accepted, hesitated, then decided to go.

What I underestimated was how hard it would be for us at home.

Removing the liveliest member of our family, without calls or texts, felt like someone had taken one of my internal organs across state lines without telling me how to heal.

Yet, as we adjust, her correspondence and ours are teaching us all more than we had imagined.

The gift of digital detox that we thought Australia was giving our daughter has also become a revelatory bequest for us - her American parents and her older brother.