Topic 2: Country and Place

There are over 200 different First Nation groups in Australia, each with their own language and geo-cultural identities.

For an introductory illustration, view this First Australians video snapshot by Reconciliation Australia. youtu.be/_Svp-x_m9pY

In every nation’s story there are important moments—events and crossroads—that shape the chapters to come.

For all Australians, this ancient land connects the stories of our past, our present and our future. The video clip below was produced by Reconciliation Australia to explore the theme of National Reconciliation Week 2016—Our History, Our Story, Our Future— and continues to have great resonance and relevance to the future of reconciliation in our nation: youtu.be/0CW_tDLo_oM ‘Our History’ reminds us all, that historical acceptance is essential to our reconciliation journey. Historical acceptance will exist when all Australians understand and accept the fact that past laws, practices and policies deeply affected the lives of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, often having devastating immediate impacts and causing much of the disadvantage that exists today. It is also a commitment to ensuring these wrongs are never repeated in the future. ‘Our Story’ reflects the fact that the journey towards reconciliation forms a significant part of Australia’s story, as do the stories of both trauma and triumph told by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. It also encourages each and every one of us to make reconciliation part of our own story. ‘Our Future’ reinforces that reconciliation must live in the hearts, minds and actions of all Australians as we move forward, in the knowledge that we believe in fairness for everyone, that our diversity makes us richer, and that together, we are stronger.

Activity: Consider books or stories in which the setting plays an important part.

The Rabbits, written by John Marsden and illustrated by Shaun Tan, is a partly allegorical fable about colonisation, told from the viewpoint of the colonised. A video of the story is available below.

Activity

Name of book or story	Place/setting	Importance of place/setting
You and Me, Murrawee	River bank	Continuity
My Place	City	Environment & cultural traditions
Angel’s Gate	Country town	People’s lives
The Fat and Juicy Place	Behind the school	Special things happen there

 

Resources

Baker, J 1995, The story of Rosy Dock, Random House, NSW. Bell, H 1996, Idjhil—and the land cried for its lost soul, Cygnet, WA. Crew, G 1995, Angel's Gate, Mammoth, Port Melbourne, Vic. Hashmi, K 1998, You and Me, Murrawee, Viking, Ringwood, Victoria. Kidd, D 1992, The fat and juicy place, Angus & Robertson, Pymble, NSW. Marsden, J & Tan, S 1998, The rabbits, Thomas C Lothian, Port Melbourne, Vic. Wheatley, N & Rawlins, D 1987, My place, Collins Dove, Vic.

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Activity: Apply deep knowledge to the teaching of Australian History.

Year 4

The key inquiry questions at this level are:

• Why did the great journeys of exploration occur?
• What was life like for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples before the arrival of the Europeans?
• Why did the Europeans settle in Australia?
• What was the nature and consequence of contact between Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander Peoples and early traders, explorers and settlers?

Year 9

The key inquiry questions at this level are:

• What were the changing features of the movements of people from 1750 to 1918?
• How did new ideas and technological developments contribute to change in this period?

Activity

Use a mind map

Using a mind map in this instance is valuable in that visual cues help us to better recall and remember information; words are abstract and often difficult for the brain to retain, whereas visuals are concrete; the effective use of visuals can decrease learning time, improve comprehension, enhance retrieval, and increase retention; and abstract concepts can benefit from images, when course creators use visual metaphors (McDaniel, M & Einstein, G 1986 & Meier, D 2000).

Activity: Understand the impact of colonisation.

Background

Understanding the impact that colonisation has had on the rights, recognition and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders peoples is a big step towards understanding the importance of reconciliation in Australia. According to John Pilger (1985), ‘The secret history of Australia is a historical conspiracy of silence. Written history has long applied selectivity to what it records, largely ignoring the shameful way that Aboriginal people [and Torres Strait Islander people] were, and continue to be, treated.'

Activity

youtu.be/sxFZwKpazDw

Activity: Reflect on what connection to Country, and an understanding of the intergenerational impact of colonisation, have to do with reconciliation.

My name is Tace Vigliante and I am a lecturer in Teacher Education at Charles Sturt University. I wanted to share with you my experience of coming to understand the role education can play as a vehicle for achieving reconciliation in Australia.

When I started university I was confronted with many new and big ideas—ideas that were in some cases in conflict with ideas I had previously held, and that were held by the people around me about whom I cared and respected, such as my family, friends and teachers.

There are a few ideas that have been very powerful in determining the educator that I am today. I am going to share one of these ideas now. You might expect that such a ‘powerful’ idea would require a lengthy explanation or argument to be convinced but this idea can be explained as briefly as this:

Everything we have as Australians is a result of the land being taken from Indigenous Australians.

This idea, delivered in a single sentence in a social psychology lecture blew me away. It seemed so straight forward when I heard it. Here was a simple claim, and I could not counter it.

What’s more, I had recently also learnt at university (in another subject) that Indigenous Australians were deprived of land due to the concept of terra nullius. In essence, I extrapolated; Australians have benefited and still benefit immensely from land being taken from Indigenous Australians and conversely the effect on Indigenous Australians was devastating; and Indigenous Australians continue to be disadvantaged and feel the effects of colonisation today. What an injustice I thought. From this I came to think that, if non-Indigenous Australians benefit from this injustice then non-Indigenous Australians should (have an ethical obligation) be working towards and contributing to the process of reconciliation.

This all took place in my first semester at university and I wondered, why had no one ever shared this idea with me before? I probed further. It was not a particularly popular idea. Whenever I raised this idea of injustice or injustice towards Indigenous Australians I was met most often with contestation, sometimes anger and many times misinformation. Yet, I did not come across a good argument against this claim and the subsequent conclusion, that if we, as non-Indigenous Australians benefit from this injustice then we, as non-Indigenous Australians should contribute to reconciliation.

As I began at the start of my story, throughout my studies in my first year of university, I was challenged by many new and different ideas and it was at this point that I began to see that teachers and educators play a significant role in shaping society and have the potential to be agents of change. At the end of the year I enrolled in a Bachelor of Education.

Activity

 

Activity: Assess the Australian education system through the framework of the International Labour Organisation's Convention No. 169.

In Australia, we have still not yet arrived at the best way for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in Australia to achieve cultural rights or economic justice as outlined in the International Labour Organisation’s Convention No. 169 on Indigenous and Tribal Peoples (ILO169) (Ma Rhea, Z & Anderson, P 2011).

Activity

youtu.be/Xto5mqxfDAw

Activity: Discuss the benefits of an Indigenous language program.

Activity: Write or draw your story about Country.

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Activity: Reflect on the importance of Place as a concept.

Assessment objective

As a class, or in groups, develop a mind map about the story The Rabbits, by John Marsden and Shaun Tan. Video of the story is available below.

Introduction

The Rabbits is a partly allegorical fable about colonisation, told from the viewpoint of the colonised. A mind map is a diagram used to visually organise information. A mind map is often created around a single concept, drawn as an image in the centre of a blank landscape page, to which associated representations of ideas such as images, words and parts of words are added. Your students may suggest any or all of the following, depending on their ages:

• family
• loss
• dispossession
• The Stolen Generations
• displacement
• wisdom
• women
• health
• [sense of] place
• kinship
• languages
• knowledge
• Aboriginal English
• connection [to land]
• environment
• oral history
• The Dreaming
• petroglyphs (and other visual forms of communication)
• song, dance, storytelling, ceremony (and other ways of performing communication)
• bush foods and medicine
• interdependence
• technology (designing, making and appraising: weapons, tools, baskets, etc)
• science (seasons, astronomy)
• land management (firestick farming, propagation)
• introduction of hard-hoofed (strange and new) animals’ destruction of food sources
• remains (middens, carbon-dating)

Write these on the back of “post-it” notes (so that they can be placed word/s side down).

Assessment

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Assessment objective

Write a story about your chosen region in an essay that connects to a narrative about Country.

• You are required to write your own story: one that explores the demographics and diaspora of a region.
• You can choose a region that is significant to you.
• You can use a map of Indigenous groups or draw on the area you live in, study in, work in or were born in—it may be an area you love to visit or holiday in.
• Word count 2500 words.

Assessment

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Assessment objective

Consider the quote below and write a 2000 word report which explores the connections between contemporary Indigenous circumstances and Australia’s colonial history.

Indigenous education history cannot be considered in isolation. As it is deeply embedded within the totality of Australia’s colonial history, it is a complex nexus of social and educational policy. (Herbert 2012)

Assessment

Assessment objective 1

Using the concepts highlighted in The Rabbits by Shaun Tan (see Assessment The Rabbits) and the passage below, students investigate the history of Australia in the period 1750 – 1918 in depth.

The extension of settlement, including the effects of contact (intended and unintended) between European settlers in Australia and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples (ACDSEH020)

 The Australian Year 7 History curriculum content description invites  Students [to] investigate the history of an Asian society OR Australia in the period 1750 – 1918 in depth. Bruce Pascoe (2014), advises that at the time he was writing Dark emu, ‘a massive roller is at work crushing volcanic stone in [Victorian] Western District pastures. … The operator of the roller is “just doing what he is told”, but he wouldn’t be allowed to do it at Stonehenge or Easter Island’. Destruction of Aboriginal sites was perpetrated by the initial visitors and witnessed by many Europeans. William Thomas (an Aboriginal Protector) saw several aquaculture systems such as the eel traps around Lake Condah. According to Thomas (2013), one such system belonged to a particularly large village near Port Fairy, which had more than thirty houses capable of accommodating around 200-250 people. The whole village was burned and the sluice gates of the fishery destroyed (Pascoe 2014). OR

Assessment objective 2

Using the concepts highlighted in The Rabbits by Shaun Tan (see Assessment The Rabbits) and the passage below, design a lesson that might be used at the Year 4 enquiry.

The nature of contact between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and … the Europeans, and the effects of these interactions on, for example, people and environments. (ACHASSK086)

Destruction of Aboriginal sites took place in the 1800s, yet in 1963, “the dispossession was continuing. Police came at gunpoint under cover of darkness to Mapoon, an Aboriginal community in Queensland, and they ordered people from their homes and they burned those homes to the ground and they gave the land to a bauxite mining company. And today those people remember that as the 'Night of the Burning' ” (http://www.ethics.org.au/on-ethics/blog/january-2016/stan-grant-s-speech-on-racism-and-the-australian-d).

Country and Place

The aim of this topic was to increase your awareness of the importance Australian history in the development of critical and creative thinking skills. To deepen your understanding of history there has been an emphasis on Country and Place.

Questions for review:

• Were you challenged by the perspectives presented in this topic? Reflect on why/why not.
• What is the relationship between knowledge and understanding of Australian history and supporting reconciliation in schools?
• What are some actions you could take to further extend your knowledge and understanding to become more of a critical and creative thinker and cultivate this in your students?

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Choose one Focus Area of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers where you could apply the knowledge and skills you have gained from Topic 2, such as:

2.1 Content and teaching strategies of the teaching area

Demonstrate knowledge and understanding of the concepts, substance and structure of the content and teaching strategies of the teaching area. (Graduate level)

Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (Graduate teachers)

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« Return to Topic 2: Country and Place » Continue to Topic 3: Significant events