Moreton Bay

Winston Churchill is said to have described the tradition of the Royal British Navy as nothing but "rum, buggery and the lash." Whether factual or modern fable, the description is certainly applicable to the character of the officers in charge of the convicts who first came to Australia. We began this unit looking at a ballad written by a convict, possibly at the time of Captain Logan's death which this ballad celebrates.

Understanding Australia's early history as a penal colony is critical to understanding Australian history and its people's notions of liberty. It provides a stark contrast to our own history, and yet has interesting parallels. I have heard that at the start of the Revolutionary War, many Americans saw themselves as superior to the British and were disgusted by their carrying on. They despised being ruled by men of questionable character and their activities were repugnant to the deeply held religious values of the Americans.

The character they were dealing with is made evident by even a cursory examination of Australia's early history. So here is our starting point (the text is rather violent, so you might want to listen to it before sharing with younger children):



(The text of the ballad is available here.)

Discovering the seeds of liberty is central to our studies of history and this is why I selected this ballad. Yes, it is violent. But this period of history was very violent. Note the phrases in the ballad which give rise to a yearning for liberty:

...banished now from my native shore,
...stole me...
...prisoner...
...in chains
Excessive tyranny each day prevails.

...beastly treated
...heavy irons...
...flogging...lacerated
...painted with my crimson gore
...starvation...
...mangled...

Like the Egyptians and ancient Hebrews
We were oppressed under Logan's yoke...
...tyrant...
And when from bondage we are liberated
Our former sufferings will fade from mind.

They may have been convicts, but the treatment was brutal.

Because Australia was a penal colony at the time, little emphasis was placed on education. There was also a sort of "caste" system in place from early on, which will give rise to great conflict later. It is a struggle for liberty against an unjust system.

That is why a man who steals a sheep and prefers death to capture has been immortalized in a song which came close to becoming Australia's national anthem: Waltzing Matilda. And while we may have a fascination for our outlaws such as Jesse James, I think it is significant to note that some of these characters in Australian history, such as Ned Kelley, seem to have earned the status of hero. Not for their crimes, but for their strivings against the oppression which was put in place by Great Britain.

More historical information about this period may be found in this article, Convicts and the British Colonies.

Captain Cook's voyage to Australia

Since liberty is our man purpose in education, we look closely at the source of government in the lives of the people we study in history. Government involves that which directs, regulates, controls and restrains us. When we have good self-government, we self-direct, self-regulate, etc. When not, someone else does that for us, either in our community or in civil government. That is why to be a free nation, we must be a virtuous nation. We have also looked at the difference between a leader and a dictator. Good leaders inspire others to follow them. They serve and make decisions based on the best interests of those whom they lead. Dictators, on the other hand, force people to submit to them.

This is why the story of Captain Cook caught our attention immediately. We compared him a little to Columbus whom we studied last year. Columbus had many mixed motives in his journey, but he was not a very good leader. He chose to take men with him who did not want to go. They stirred up trouble with the other men and may have been responsible for some damage done to the ship. He still did not really deal with them accordingly. It seems he was a little too desperate for men.

Captain Cook, on the other hand, appears to have been a remarkable leader. From the introduction to his log book:

On Cook's ships a band of officers and seamen, enriched by growing experience, enjoyed a strenuous but not unhappy life, and members of his crews enlisted for voyage after voyage. An important cause of this was that, in a savage age, he pioneered comparatively mild punishments and the wearing of clean and warm dress. There was little of the usual brutal flogging, and instead of keelhauling any seaman who undressed during the long and wet voyages, Cook encouraged his men to change their damp and filthy clothes...

From the stories of the seamen, they had a remarkable trust in him, claiming he could smell land before anyone sighted it.

So far, we have read the introduction to his log book and about his arrival to Eastern Australia, the discovery of Botany Bay and his shipwreck on the coral reefs East of Queensland. We have done this over the course of three days. Each day, they had a small task complete while I read.

While reading the introduction about his life, the children colored picture of Captain Cook (from captaincook.org/uk. Day two, since we were reading about Botany Bay, they colored a eucalyptus tree with a koala in it. While reading about the shipwreck, they made a raft out of popsicle sticks.

Captain Cook's log book with some general information about this fascinating leader may be found online. It is amazing to see just how much he sailed and all he "discovered," but we are focusing on chapter eight (about Australia).

This comes slightly out of order. We also spent a day on the rumors of Australia but I have to track down my materials. So within the next couple of days, I will post a pre-Captain Cook lesson.

X-Ray Painting and Bark Art

I was wondering how this would work to look at a culture's artwork and use it sort of like we use primary source documents to see what we could learn about that culture. I have never done anything like it before, and wasn't even sure how pedagogically sound it would be. But it seemed like a good idea when my daughter raised it as a suggestion for how to study the Aboriginal people of Australia, and I have been very satisfied with the results.

The last study we did was on what is termed "X-ray painting." Animals and people were painted on various surfaces in amazing detail, but seemingly from the inside out. We started by looking at all the photographs of fossilized fishes at Photovalet. It was a mini-science lesson as the children looked at the impressions these ancient fishes made on the rock. We then looked at this piece of art, painted on bark.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art gave us some information about how the artwork was created.

And Aboriginal Art Online gave us a nice history of bark art.

My children went outside and worked at peeling bark off of logs from our woodpile for their project. We had no idea about how to prepare the bark, but this is what we did:

1. Soaked in bleach and scrubbed the inside surface. (There was mold growing on some of it.)
2. Dried in oven at 200 degrees.
3. Got frustrated that it curled.
4. Re-soaked and laid it out on the counter.
5. Piled things on top of it to flatten it.
6. Put it back in the oven to dry at 200 degrees with a pizza stone on top of it.

You could probably skip steps two through four.

The children then each took their sample I printed off and went off to make their own bark art. I read the next story from Indigenous Australia while they worked. My younger two were more interested in the process.

Bug (2) painted away.

Bear (4) mostly just enjoyed mixing the paint.

And Mouse (8) made a fish and the leg of a dinosaur.

What did my daughter learn about the indigenous peoples of Australia?

1. They were very aware of their environment.

2. Their stories reflect the observation of the relationships between the animals around them.

3. They were very adept at using what was available to them to make beautiful pieces of art which lasted for centuries.

4. The desert sand art uses symbols which look very much like the tracks the various animals/activities make in the sand. The ability to track was probably very important. Many of these pictures also show good hunting grounds and watering holes, demonstrating the importance of this kind of knowledge.

5. The X-Ray painting shows attention to the internal features of the animals that were hunted.

Essentially, my daughter learned that the Aboriginals were hunters/gatherers with a highly developed culture. Their history (their story) was very important to them and preserved through stories and art.

homeschooling, Aborigines, Aboriginal art

Learning history through art

When we study history, we attempt to use primary sources whenever possible. The indigenous peoples of Australia, however, had no record-keeping system like we have today. In fact, they did not even have a written language. They communicated their history and their family relationships through a variety of art forms, including storytelling, rock painting, bark painting, sand painting and body painting. In order to get a glimpse into the lives of indigenous Australians, we decided to begin not by looking at the first impressions of arriving Englishmen, but by looking at their artwork.

Principle: Individuality

Leading Idea: Every culture has its own symbols and ways of sharing its heritage

Scripture: Gen 11:8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.

For more on the foundations of art and the general viewpoint I teach from, check this entry.

The most interesting thing to me was the story of the man who first brought Aboriginal art into recognition. I cannot find the link anymore, but he began painting his work on canvas and it was well-received by everyone but the Aboriginals. They thought he was sharing too many of their secrets. Some of these paintings are not shared even with Aboriginal women, let alone outsiders if I remember correctly. He was sharply rebuked. He therefore covered his artwork with dots. This dot art became highly valued and is probably one of the most recognizable features of indigenous Australian art. But what we are paying top dollar to include in our collections is actually a cloaking device!

We perused the offerings at this gallery to get an idea of desert art (note the numbers at the bottom so that you can look at more). We then looked at the descriptions of some of the popular motifs. I printed off a copy of the symbols for each of my children and we went back to the art gallery to see how many symbols we recognized. What do you see in this work?


After identifying some of the symbols and talking about the artwork, we started our first project. To prepare for this, we covered the bottom of a coffee filter with glue and poured sand on top. This was to form a hard "ground" for the children to paint on. I would have used a paper plate, but we didn't have any. We allowed this to dry overnight on a sheet of plastic wrap to keep it from sticking to the bookshelf.

The children then took their hardened sand and painted their sample of Aboriginal art while I told them some more about the Dreamtime and Aboriginal art. Here is a nice site with more information and the stories I am sharing with my children. Right now, they are just listening to them as stories. When they are older, we will look at them more analytically. For example, I find it very interesting that one of the more important figures in the Dreamtime is Rainbow snake who made the waterning holes.

In this lesson you can also see a little of how I teach multiple age levels. All three children sat near me while we looked at the artwork. All three received a symbol sheet. All three painted. And all three listened to the story I told them. Each understood something on his or her own level. Here is what they produced:

My Picture, Crocodile
Bug, age two

Crocodiles in the River
Bear, age four


Snakes at the Watering Hole
Mouse, age eight

My daughter was able to reason the importance of food and water sources to the Aboriginals from studying their artwork. When you live in such a dry environment, it is important to know where water is likely to be and where the good hunting grounds are so they enter frequently into the artwork. She also saw a little of the importance of storytelling. Later on, I want to do some storytelling with her using these techniques. I'm not sure how to share that as a lesson. Maybe I'll see if I can figure out how to upload a video!

Tomorrow we will be looking at rock art, so stay tuned!

Photo credits: Janet Long Nakamarra, pictured above; Women's Ceremony, the posted example

homeschooling, lessons, principle approach

Coming up next...the Aboriginals

I just realized that it has been a week since we last updated this. We have been studying Australia's geography as we laid out in this entry. The topographical map is interesting. We had a harder time finding a map to copy from than I had anticipated, but finally settled for merging two maps we had found in books. She colored the Great Dividing Range brown (because they were mountains), colored in a couple of lakes, traced out the few major rivers, colored the rainforests green and most of Australia yellow since it is semi-arid.

Suddenly, it became obvious to my daughter just why most of the population is concentrated along the East Coast of Australia.

I have started looking to next week's focus which will be the Aboriginal people of Australia. I am having a difficult time determining just how I want to approach the topic. Just like in our own history, there are some difficult themes coming up. The main text I'm using at the moment is Among Cannibals by Carl Lumholz who spent four years among the Aboriginals in Queensland and wrote about his experiences back in 1889.

I won't be using this directly with my daughter, or if so only certain passages. There is significant author bias that she would need to be able to discern before I would give her a text like this. He makes several comments which are somewhat racist and I do not wish my daughter to determine that groups of people are of less value because of the color of their skin or other such determinations. At the same time, I believe this is the book I read which gives credence to the general philosophy that all cultures are equal.

That is a difficult and somewhat charged discussion to try to get into, and not really something I'm going to get into with an eight year old. Suffice it say that I do not think that the marriage customs of the aboriginals are "equal" to our own:

Near Herbert Vale I had the good fortune to be able to witness a marriage among the blacks. A camp of natives was just at the point of breaking up, when an old man suddenly approached a woman, seized her by the wrist of her left hand and shouted, Yongul ngipa!--that is, This one belongs to me (literally "one I"). She resisted with feet and hands, and cried, but he dragged her off, though she made resistance during the whole time and cried at the top of her voice. For a mile away we could hear her shrieks.

Nor am I about to condone cannibalism.

We are going to look at this in the light of scripture. I haven't read as much on how the aboriginals were treated by the British, but I know it wasn't pleasant. I viewed a re-enactment on a video in a museum in Melbourne that sickened me. Not even so much for what was done back in the 1800s but for what was done in the name of memorializing the event in the 20th century. This should provide a very nice opportunity to take a closer look at how the seeds of local self-government are planted. The British were somewhat appalled by what they saw in the Aboriginals and attempted to "civilize" them...or they would kill them.

Christianity, on the other hand, teaches that change comes from within. I am hoping to find at least some examples of missions evangelizing in this manner, but I'm guessing it will look much like our own history with a mixture of motives behind many of them. Christianity was widely accepted by the native people of Australia, and today approximately two thirds consider themselves Christians. I think this continues to be a relevant issue in Australia today as there has historically been a debate about how to best support Aboriginals (through assimilation or through supporting their native cultures on the various lands, I'm guessing something like our reservations). Of course, religion isn't a part of this debate, but how do you "assimilate" a culture?

These are some interesting topics to explore with older children, perhaps, but we will be taking a look at some of them, scaled down to the understanding of an eight year old.

Note: There is some debate about the term "Aboriginal." I'm not exactly one for political correctness, but I'm also not one for offending groups of people. It is a British term which was applied to the native peoples of Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea. There are a number of terms which the Aboriginal themselves prefer, many of them providing a sense of identity with their own unique communities.

Related Tags: homeschooling, Australia, Aborigine

Individuality and the Emu

For this lesson, we started with one of my children's favorite songs, Old Man Emu by John Williamson, a popular folk artist:
At the end, Williamson sings,

Well there is a moral to this ditty - Oom ba da little da da da
Thrush can sing but he ain't pretty - Oom ba da little da da
Duck can swim, but he can't sing, nor can the eagle on the wing
Emu can't fly, but I'm telling you, he can run the pants off a kangaroo.

My daughter reasoned that the moral of the song is that each animal has its own unique gifts. She recognized that this is related to God's principle of individuality in that we are each a unique creation in Him. We have different talents, strengths and weaknesses. Likewise, God gave each of the animals different means of protecting themselves, communicating and finding sustenance. The emu may not be able to fly, but he is an incredibly fast bird, topping speeds of 30 miles an hour.

In scripture, we find this principle applied directly to His church:

Now there are diversities of gifts, but the same Spirit. And there are differences of administrations, but the same Lord. And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all.--1 Corinthians 12:4-6

To learn more about the unique characteristics of the emu, my daughter read a brief informational text about emus. To record the information she learned, she made a wanted poster about the emu in Williamson's song. I got the template for the wanted poster at Education World. Scroll down to "Icebreakers" and one of the choices is "Wanted Poster." This will open in a Word document and you can modify the text to fit the questions you want your child to answer. I also gave each of my children a coloring sheet to color.


We will be studying more about the animals of Australia using simple nonfiction texts and this wanted poster, but I probably won't post on each one unless we find something truly unique. It is a fairly basic format that can be used with anything and is a nice precursor to the more formal research paper that she is not ready for, yet.

Australia, emu, homeschooling, home school

Our study: A Vision and an Outline

My educational philosophy states that I am educating my children for liberty. Thus liberty is a frequent underlying theme in all of our studies, and an important historic principle according to the biblical principle approach.

The Principle of Individuality, emphasizing uniqueness and diversity, has a natural connection to Australia. As an island continent, it remained separated from the "known" world for many centuries. There is great diversity of life found nowhere else on earth, interesting land forms and a unique culture. The Australia of today is influenced by all of these factors as well as its English heritage.

This English heritage is very interesting to look at in connection with thoughts on liberty. Australia's government is born out of some of the same traditions as our own with one marked difference: we were a nation of religious dissidents while they were a nation of convicts. There is a long period in Australia's history that is wrought with violence, class struggle and yearnings for a degree of liberty from British rule which represented oppression much more vividly than it did here. I am reminded of an Australian folk song highlighting this aspect of its history:

You beat your drum
You drink your rum
You threaten' me with hangin'

Such was the life of a convict living in a penal colony. Being a penal colony, however, one thing was noticeably absent from Australia: education. While America quickly became one of the most literate nations of the world given its people's desire to educate children in the scriptures, little attention was given at all to the education of Australians.

After all, they were only convicts.

We will continue to share our studies more or less in the same format as we have been. We will try to provide some interesting information, thoughts from our discussion and plenty of links so you can learn more. The following is an outline of what we roughly have planned for the summer. This will get extended as we progress, and I will continue to update the links to individual posts regularly (although not necessarily after every posting). We will be studying three days per week, and will generally look at some children's literature on the fourth day. I may include some thoughts and reflections on other days.

Alongside the documents, we will also be utilizing a number of Australian folk songs, well-known poems, and other products of Australian culture to illustrate historic principles and to provide a glimpse of what Australians think of their own history.

Feel free to ask any questions or provide any resources you know of. We certainly are not experts!

Unfortunately, I don't know how to make a simple outline look nice in this thing, so here is my best alternative:

I. Introduction
Studying History: scriptural premise, research practice
Australian Geography: procedure

II. Before the colonists
The People
The Landscape

III. Rumors of a Southland
Early tales of "australis incognito"
The first explorers: Captain James Cook

IV. Australia as a penal colony

V. Toward liberty (significant events shaping the history and character of Australia)