A New World Down Under: Welcome to Country

We’re back near Sydney and midterms are over. If you thought St. Olaf students were serious when it comes to studying for exams, then you thought right. For the week before exams every free second was spent preparing. I, along with a few others, felt that the rest of the group was going a bit overboard, because if there’s one thing that we’ve learned about Australia it’s that Australia is no worries. We still spent most of our time studying though. We would just spend two hours instead of five every night, and that would be in the sauna, and we got up right before breakfast in the morning instead of waking up in the wee hours to get a head start. For me this technique paid off, as I was very pleased with my results.

Now that we’re done with our exams we have started studying cultural anthropology in depth. An aboriginal lawyer taught us about the history of the aboriginal people since white colonisation of AUS, which began in the late 1700s. You may know this, but AUS is a very young country, being formed in 1901, and since then the aboriginal people have had their culture and country stripped from them. It wasn’t until the late 70s that AUS revoked “The White Australia Policy” from legislation, which only allowed white immigrants into their boarders, and it wasn’t until a few years later that aboriginal people were considered citizens of the country. It took as recent as 2008 for parliament to apologise for the atrocities committed by the government on the aboriginal people. They are still recovering from these, which include massacres and the stolen generation, where children were taken from their families and sent to missions in order to remove their “barbarian culture” and to learn the ways of the west. Most aboriginal people nowadays try to assimilate into modern society, but a few, mostly into the Northern Territory, still hold onto their own cultures and live completely traditional lives in the bush. We also received a lecture on “dreamtime,” which is a poor description but the easiest way to describe the aboriginal’s religious connection to the earth and their sense of space and time. We visited the AUS Museum of Sydney and toured through their aboriginal artifacts. The next day we toured The AUS Art Museum and observed aboriginal art, which is their way to record the stories of their ancestors, which have been passed down orally for thousands of generations. To us the paintings just looked like patterns painted in ochre, but to an aboriginal person the art will reveal both the clan who painted the piece and the spiritual significance that it depicts. I find this incredibly impressive, as there were more than 600 aboriginal languages, and therefore an equal number of unique stories, that existed in AUS prior to British colonisation. But then again it’s understandable that they’d be able to recognise the art since colonisation happened only a few generations ago, while their people have been in AUS and passing on the stories for somewhere around 50,000 years.

We left the heart of Sydney on Wed. the 21^st, and headed to The Royal National Park, which is located just south of Sydney. Here we paddled canoes up the Kangaroo River while learning about native plants and animals. We cooked beef and roo bangers (sausages) for lunch and learned how to throw spears. While we were eating a few sulfur-crested cockatoos came up to us and begged for a bite. Even though there were signs that said feeding the birds would result in a $500 fine, we snuck them a few pieces of break. After lunch we headed to the beach spent the afternoon there.

On Thurs. we met another aboriginal man and learned more about the native plants that were utilised by the native people. My favorite plant was the coastal acacia. Its use came from when you crush the leaves in your hands, add water, and then if you scrub hard enough you get a soapy substance that gives your hands a deep clean. We learned to make twine out of tree bark and all of us sat in silence making bracelets and necklaces for about thirty min. We also learned how to throw a boomerang, which was awesome until I threw a bad throw and hit an Asian guy’s ankle. He and his family were angry, and I felt really bad and apologised, but I don’t know if they could understand English. Then in the afternoon we went snorkeling in Chowder Bay. I saw a small stingray, a few crabs and fish, and many sea urchins. Some people found some sea horses, but I couldn’t find them since they were camouflaged in the kelp.

On Friday we helped out the National Parks Service by excavating an old military tunnel near our accommodation. Where we are staying used to be a military base, so there are tunnels that connect lookouts on the bluffs all around the harbour. Once the tunnels were abandoned some thirty years ago, they were filled in to keep hoodlums out. Before we started our volunteer work an aboriginal man named Les welcomed us to his country. This was a spiritual ceremony where he placed three white ochre marks on our foreheads and hands, which sybmolised us listening, looking and learning about his land. He was a very lively man, and later let us eat some “bush tucker” that he collected and even taught us to play the didgeridoo. We moved about 20 wheelbarrow loads out before lunch, which once again consisted of bangers. After work we decided to go to a hidden beach, which turned out not only to be a nude beach, but also a gay nude beach. It was a little awkward for the group of 10 or so of us that went, but we were still able to catch the last of the rays before the sun set below the trees.

We are heading back into the heart of Sydney on Sunday, which is a free day. A girl from our group surprised us by letting us know that her dad rented a 40’ catamaran for us to ride around and snorkel from on Sunday afternoon for four hours. Then in the evening we are going to “The Hunger Games” movie. I think just about all of us have read the book by this time. We are in Sydney until Wednesday, the 28^th, and then we have our second holiday. I just bought my ticket to Brisbane, which is a 14-hour ride away from Sydney Central. I am not sure what we’re going to do there, but I guess we still have five days to figure that out!