On Wednesday, 25th of October 2017, eight 9th grade classes listened to a presentation about Australia. A guy from Australia, Josh Morshead, told us about his life, the country, the culture and the history of Australia.
He has married a German woman, who he met on her backpack trip through Australia. He is still living with her and their 3 kids – not in Melbourne any longer but in Ostfriesland.
He started the presentation with a short part of history of Australia and why the Union Jack, flag of Great Britain, is on the Australian flag. In 1770, Captain Cook conquered Australia with his English soldiers and appointed it an English colony. The had the advantage because the Aboriginals, the native Australians, had no guns to defend themselves. The English or also named „the Whites“ shooed them away from the coast to the middle of the country, into the desert.
After this history part, he told us about the prejudice of the Australian beachlife with surfing people and very warm weather. “But Australia is more than this“, he also told us about the longest road without any curves through the desert and cool things like that Australia is 29 times bigger than Germany, but Germany has 80 million inhabitants and Australia, which is bigger, has only 22 million inhabitants. When you want to travel to Australia you must travel by plane 25 hours with intermediate stop in Singapur or Dubai and you have a time difference. Then he told us about the beaches, strict traffic rules and a famous national hero. The beaches are more than 1000 miles long. A very famous beach is the Sydney Bondi Beach, it is a surf-beach where nets are in the water to protect the people from dangerous animals like sharks. On those beaches, they have little airplanes which control that the nets do not rip. (By the way: Australia is the country with most dangerous animals like toxic snakes, spiders, crocodiles or sharks.)
Later the Australian guy told us about Ned Kelly, an aggressive man who was involved in many crimes but believed that the police had too much power and misused it. He shot policenmen to point the way and fought for his view of things until he was hanged – and so he became a national hero.
Another thing that people may think is cool about Australia, is the warm weather, but we learned that the long summer phase of 4-5 months (when the temperatue can go up to 45 degrees) can induced very terrible forest or bush fires.
At last he told us about how the Australians and the Aboriginals finally got together in peace. A big step for this relationship was, when more and more Aboriginal player came into the AFL (the Australian Footboll Leaque) and one Aboriginal player made an important goal. And so Australia started a process of apologizing to the Natives.
All in All we learned much about Australia and now we know very interesting facts.
Text: Jana Hinrika Onken, 9c