Happy Thanksgiving!
Today we spent the day at the Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park. It is described as where Australia “begins” so we thought it would be fitting as today is Thanksgiving back home. It is a cultural park that gives you an opportunity to “experience authentic Aboriginal culture dating back over 40,000 years.” Somewhat. It was fascinating to learn about the history and the culture, neither of which we knew much about at all. Zach wrote a report on it for school which mostly covered the hunting and weapons portion of the day, but both we all really enjoyed the experience.
Below is Zach’s report on his experience - minus his pictures.
Tjapukai Aboriginal Cultural Park
By Zach JohnstonNovember 28, 2019
Today is Thanksgiving in the United States. We are in Australia and we went to Tjapukai Cultural Park. We left at 8:30 in the morning and got there around 9. We left on a big bus and I tripped on the way in and hurt my shin. When we got there we got to walk over a bridge to the other side and I got to feed turtles and ducks and some fish and eel. The turtles knew you were coming over the bridge by the vibration of footsteps through the support of the bridge and into the water and then they knew people would feed them. Hopefully.
Anthropologists discovered the Tjapukai in 1950 because they were too busy discovering the desert tribes and never made it over to the rainforest area before then. A man from the tribe was our leader for the day and showed us around. We did many cool things:
1. We went to the spears and boomerangs training where I learned to throw a boomerang and throw a spear. The cross shape boomerang is used as a weapon and the regular boomerang was for hitting birds out of the sky. Rainforest tribes are the only ones to carry boomerangs.
2. We went to the Bush Foods and Medicine and I learned that one these red fruits (pandanus) contains as much caffeine as 20 cups of coffee. That’s a lot of caffeine! Also during that part we got to crunch up a lemon myrtle leaves and smell them. It is used to clear out your sinuses, help heal sore throat and in cooking.
3. We heard our tour guide play the didgeridoo. It was very very cool. It sounded like vibrations and noise. They played it for celebrations and ceremonies. The didgeridoo was created in Darwin and if a woman plays it she will fall pregnant and have bad luck. The people who guided us through our activities had their names painted onto them but it wasn’t in English. It was in their language. Our guide told us there are over 500 tribes in Australia and over 300 languages among their people.
4. I got to paint a boomerang I painted it half red, half white and I got to make a bracelet too. One of the tribe women helped me braide it with some beads on it. It looks very, very good.
There are lots of other interesting facts I learned today.
There are over 20 tribes in the area where we were today and their territory is marked by rivers, lakes, trees and such.
There are over 100 tribes in the rainforest and over 500 tribes in all of Australia with 300 different languages.
If you want a weapon you have to make it and the person who makes it would put a curse on it so if anybody else tried to use it they would get cursed and get sick and die.
If you broke one tribe rule and they would break your collarbone. If you broke another tribal rule they would break your other collarbone. And if you broke three tribe rules then they would break both your kneecaps. If you were caught using someone else’s weapon you would be stabbed in your leg and it would be like 6 meters and you would have to pull it through your leg and out the other sideIt shows that you were strong. If you if you broke it off to pull it through it would show your tribe you were weak. This is still used today.
Fathers teach sons how to make weapons. If they break it they have to make a replacement on their own.
Rainforest tribes have the biggest shields so they can hide behind it and also hide their kids. Young kids have to earn it to be a warrior. Different tribes have different symbols on the shields.
The rest of Thanksgiving we did FaceTime with my cousins and we went to get pizza as a special dinner on the water. We stopped at the bat tree, a tree that is full of bats, on the way to dinner.
