ANZAC Day display, 2011

Our ANZAC Day display for 2011.

Flags acquired around Australia Day, when they're plentiful and inexpensive.  Bunting is four sheets of coloured cardboard, cut into pennants and stapled to string.  Photos using Hipstamatic (Kodot Grizzled/John S.)

On top of the bookcase is this picture of ANZAC Cove:

and two great quotes related to the day, the ode and Ataturk on how our sons are now theirs too.

The bookmarks we use feature these two quotes - I designed the bookmarks a few years ago (using Microsoft Publisher, they are printed eight to the page on brown/green cardboard) and they work nicely each year.  It's good to put both those pieces of writing in the hands of our students each ANZAC Day.

The school, of course, has ANZAC Day remembrance assemblies for the students and staff.  The library's display is in support of this.  It's good policy and practice to work in with school/national events like this; sometimes libraries can be perceived as being islands/apart/disconnected.  Better to be at the heart of things.



Lest we forget.

Ruth



Trove: researching Australia

Have you discovered Trove yet?

It's a project from the National Library of Australia.

Trove is a new discovery experience focused on Australia and Australians. It supplements what search engines provide. If you are researching in the fields of the social sciences, literature, local or family history, or need inspiration for your school assignment, then this is the tool for you.


For example if researching images relating to Edmund Barton, our first Prime Minister, results will include descriptions such as people, book, manuscript, map and newspaper articles. A researcher searching for information on Nellie Melba will be presented with a range of results including biographies, pictures, music, newspapers, books etc.

Find out more on the Trove Australia site here.  You can follow them on Twitter: @TroveAustralia

One to pass on to your history teachers and others doing work involving Australian history (like maybe that science assignment that focuses on Australian scientists?)

Cheers

Ruth

My Place (TV series) tonight on ABC3

My Place, the picture book, is brilliant.

(Image from www.bookdepository.co.uk. )

Fingers crossed for the TV version.  Series 1 starts tonight on ABC3, 13 parts covering half the book (success will likely translate to the second half being filmed, one gathers).

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Read more about the TV series here in an article by Greg Hassall from the Sydney Morning Herald (also the source of the image above).

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Cheers

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Ruth

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PS I won't mention that it clashes with Collectors on the ABC, because that's why we have DVD recorders and programs with repeats...

ADDED LATER: If you couldn't find ABC3 on your DVD player, you might need to run the setup program that finds channels again - since ABC3 is new, it wasn't there if you ran the setup months/longer ago when you acquired the DVD player.    You might even find other channels launched since you ran the setup.  Bonus! (And you can guess exactly why I mention this.  Yup, I'm going through the DVD player's channel guide and wondering where ABC3 might be found... - it's the set-top box/digital receiver, not the telly).

Source of Australian pictures

The National Library of Australia has a picture source/search engine with over half a million images.  Find it here.  Be amazed.  Explore.  Enjoy.

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Australia film teaser trailer

I'm sure this film will end up scrutinised as a version of Australian history and a representation of Australian culture. Quite apart from all the people who'll just enjoy it. Baz Luhrmann is a clever, clever director (and Strictly Ballroom is an HSC text, of course).

Here's the first teaser trailer for Australia, which stars Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman (sourced from the website which seems to be OK for DET computers).



Link for this trailer: http://www.trailerspy.com/movie-trailers/view/611/australia-teaser-trailer/

Here's a fansite dedicated to the film.

Apology III: Hansard: full text of speeches

Hansard has the full text of today's speeches by:

• Kevin Rudd (Prime Minister) - not only the apology, but the speech he gave to follow it
• Brendan Nelson (Leader of the Opposition) - response

This week's Apology in Parliament

This week the Prime Minister will stand up in Parliament and say sorry to the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who were taken from their families as children.

A description from historian Inga Clendinnen:

“….with no legal process at all, in clear violation of the common-law rights of children and of parents … with no inquiry into their actual physical and emotional care, on the authority of a public servant's signature on a form, and with no appeal, children were grabbed, transported and set down again, sometimes with white foster families, more often in institutions, in conditions of acute loneliness and emotional and often physical deprivation, and immured for years until they were released to serve the white world as cheap labour.”

Some useful links:

• Reconciliation Australia
• National Sorry Day Committee
• Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission
• HREOC: Bringing them home education module
• HREOC: Us Taken-away kids

Source: memo from the Director-General, NSW Department of Education and Training received in today's email.

Apology - posters

I put together three simple posters with Microsoft Publisher, a quote on each, a line border and a script font in a small box in the bottom right, with the word sorry... in it.

The three quotes represent three points of view.

The Inga Clendinnen quote, an historian's view:

“….with no legal process at all, in clear violation of the common-law rights of children and of parents … with no inquiry into their actual physical and emotional care, on the authority of a public servant's signature on a form, and with no appeal, children were grabbed, transported and set down again, sometimes with white foster families, more often in institutions, in conditions of acute loneliness and emotional and often physical deprivation, and immured for years until they were released to serve the white world as cheap labour.”
From an account
by historian Inga Clendinnen

This quote from Us Taken Away Kids, from Alec Kruger, who was taken:

"As a child I had no mother’s arms to hold me. No father to lead me into the world. Us taken- away kids only had each other. All of us damaged and too young to know what to do. We had strangers standing over us. Some were nice and did the best they could. But many were just cruel nasty types. We were flogged often. We learnt to shut up and keep our eyes to the ground, for fear of being singled out and punished. We lived in dread of being sent away again where we could be even worse off. Many of us grew up hard and tough. Others were explosive and angry. A lot grew up just struggling to cope at all. They found their peace in other institutions or alcohol. Most of us learnt how to occupy a small space and avoid anything that looked like trouble. We had few ideas about relationships. No one showed us how to be lovers or parents. How to feel safe loving someone when that risked them being taken away and leaving us alone again. Everyone and everything we loved was taken away from us kids."
- Alec Kruger *
‘Us taken-away kids’, quotation taken from
Alec Kruger and Gerard Waterford,
Alone on the soaks, IAD Press, 2007.

And this quote from Kevin Rudd, then Leader of the Opposition, now Prime Minister:


“...simply saying that you’re sorry is such a powerful symbol.

Powerful not because it represents some expiation of guilt.

Powerful not because it represents any form of legal requirement.

But powerful simply because it restores respect.”

Kevin Rudd,
during the 2007 election campaign

Each faculty got a set of three posters photocopied on A3 paper, they're going on the school day sheet and teachers have been invited to ask for a set for their classroom if they wish. There's a pile of information about: this is an attempt to put three simple, shorter pieces of text into the learning environment, to help students understand this historic event.

15 Feb: I emailed a .pdf of these posters to the NSWTL list, so if you're on it, you can retrieve them from the email or the archives.

Australian Women's Archives Project

To quote from the website:

Australian Women’s Archives Project

The National Foundation for Australian Women established the Australian Women’s Archives Project (AWAP) in 2000, to enhance public knowledge and appreciation of the contribution women and their organisations have made to Australia. To do this, the Project encourages Australian women and their organisations to preserve their records and to make them more accessible to academic, government and community-based researchers, to journalists, to school children as well as to the general enquirer.

AWAP is comprised of two elements:

an on-line Women’s Register, containing biographical data about Australian women and their organisations;
identification of suitable collections of records, and brokering of arrangements for the archiving of these records, in some cases contributing to the costs of indexing the records.
The searchable-on-line Register of the Archives Project is a valuable and growing source of biographical data about Australian women and their organisations, with hyper-links to the archival repositories where their records are held and to other sources of information. Women and women’s organisations are listed alphabetically. You’ll also be able to search by functional classification- P covers physicists, politicians, pharmacists, pacifists and many more.

There is a number of virtual exhibitions on-line (see the sidebar). These exhibitions recognise particular groups of women, such as those who were recipients of awards under the former Imperial Honours system. More virtual exhibitions are being developed.
The Register is a joint project of the National Foundation for Australian Women and the History Department of the University of Melbourne. The eScholarship Research Centre at the University provides technical assistance to the Project.

With the apology to the stolen generations scheduled for Federal Parliament this week, I was searching for information on Aboriginal poet Oodgeroo Noonuccal. Here's the AWAP page on her, to give you an idea of its comprehensive data.