Saturday September 18, 2010

Saturday I had a field trip to North Stradbroke Island. We left UQ at 7:30 in the morning, drove to the ferry and got to Straddie by about 10 am. The field trip was for my Aboriginal Heritage class, and in that class we are learning a lot about the laws in Australia governing Aboriginals, which I might add, are quite ridiculous. Australia has basically taken everything from these poor people. I honestly feel like I’m back in the 1920’s with the way they treat these people. It’s only within the last 30 years that they were finally qualified as people. This might partially be due to the fact that Australia doesn’t have a bill of rights, and most people think that they don’t need one. Like I said, it’s absolutely ridiculous! Anyway, one of the major issues for Aboriginal people is that the government creates laws that make it sound like they will protect Aboriginal heritage sites that people want to develop on, but in practice it allows the government to go through with those development and therefore destroy places that are incredibly significant to Aboriginal people. Sometimes these areas have resources that help the Aboriginals to survive, but that doesn’t seem to matter to the Australia government. Some of the only people that advocate for the Aboriginal people are anthropologists who evaluate Aboriginal cultural landscapes and then try to convince the government not to develop on that area of land. In essence this is what we as a class had to do on Straddie. We had to go to two areas on North Stradbroke Island and evaluate the significance of those areas. Part of this required us interacting with the Aboriginal people, who were incredibly kind and welcoming. They showed us around the areas and told us stories that explained the major connections they had with the areas. It was absolutely fascinating! The first area that we went to was a creek that led out to the ocean. When we went there it was low tide so we got to walk out onto a mudflat and see all of the resources that the area provides. We also saw these “armies” of crabs travelling together. There were thousands of them walking together all over the mudflat. The second area we went to was called Brown Lake, which was gorgeous. I’ll post pictures of both places on facebook. Overall the whole experience was enlightening. The Aboriginal people that we worked with were so welcoming to us even after the way most other white people treat them. It made it hard to believe that people could actually be mean to them. Anyway, after we visited Brown Lake we headed back to the ferry to head home, and we ended up getting back to UQ around 6. At that point I headed home to make dinner and then went and got ice cream with Katie since all of our roommates were still gone. That night we were both exhausted so we just hung out and watched some movies. That’s all for now and I’ll note that you should all be proud of me because it’s been less than 2 days since my last post!! Love you and miss you!

Britt