ThreeWeeksInAustralia

For starters, I flew on February 15th at 00:40.

I was at the stress of leaving my family because it was the first time I went so long, but also enjoyed going on an adventure in Australia.

Let's go to 1 day and 13 hours of travel ☻

Australia is a country and continent surrounded by the Indian and Pacific oceans. Its main cities, Sydney, Brisbane, Melbourne, Perth and Adelaide, are built on the coast. The capital, Canberra, is located inland. The country is known for the Sydney Opera House, the Great Barrier Reef, its wild and desert expanses known as the Outback, and its unique animal species such as kangaroo and platypus. There are 24.13 million inhabitants and the official language is English.

The Queen Victoria Building, is a late nineteenth-century building designed by the architect George McRae in the Sydney central business district, Australia. The Romanesque Revival building was constructed between 1893 and 1898 and is 30 metres wide by 190 metres long. The domes were built by Ritchie Brothers a steel and metal company that also built trains, trams and farm equipment. The building fills a city block bounded by George, Market, York and Druitt Streets. Designed as a marketplace, it was used for a variety of other purposes, underwent remodelling and suffered decay until its restoration and return to its original use in the late twentieth century.

The cenotaph takes the form of a monolithic stone block in a sepulchral shape. At its two shorter ends stand two bronze statues, a soldier and a sailor guarding the cenotaph. Words are carved into the longer faces of the cenotaph: on the southern side, facing the General Post Office, the carving reads: "To Our Glorious Dead"; on the northern side, facing Challis House, it reads: "Lest We Forget." Remembrance events are frequently held at the Cenotaph. Most importantly, it is the centre for Sydney's main ANZAC and Armistice Day dawn service ceremonies, regularly drawing thousands of attendees.

The El Alamein Memorial Fountain is a fountain and war memorial in the city of Sydney, Australia. It is located in the Kings Crossarea, at the entrance to the Fitzroy Gardens on the corner of Darlinghurst Road and Macleay Street. The El Alamein Fountain was commissioned as a memorial to soldiers who died in 1942 during World War II in two battles at El Alamein, Egypt, and was designed by the Australian architect Phill Taranto as employed by architectural firm Woodward and Woodward.

lI Porcellino is the local Florentine nickname for the bronze fountain of a boar. The fountain figure was sculpted and cast by Baroque master Pietro Tacca (1577–1640) shortly before 1634, following a marble Italian copy of a Hellenistic marble original, at the time in the Grand Ducal collections and today on display in the classical section of the Uffizi Museum. The original, which was found in Rome and removed to Florence in the mid-16th century by the Medici, was associated from the time of its rediscovery with the Calydonian Boar of Greek myth. Tacca's bronze, which has eclipsed the Roman marble that served as model, was originally intended for the Boboli Garden, then moved to the Mercato Nuovo in Florence, Italy; the fountain was placed originally facing east, in via Calimala, in front of the pharmacy that by association gained the name Farmacia del Cinghiale. To gain more space for market traffic it was later moved to the side facing south, where it still stands as one of the most popular features for tourists. The present statue is a modern copy, cast in 1998 by Ferdinando Marinelli Artistic Foundry and replaced in 2008, while Tacca's bronze is sheltered in the new Museo Stefano Bardini in Palazzo Mozzi. Visitors to Il Porcellino put a coin into the boar's gaping jaws, with the intent to let it fall through the underlying grating for good luck, and they rub the boar's snout to ensure a return to Florence, a tradition that the Scottish literary traveller Tobias Smollett already noted in 1766, which has kept the snout in a state of polished sheen while the rest of the boar's body has patinated to a dull brownish-green.

The Cook Landing Site in Waimea on Kauaʻi island in Hawaii, is where Captain James Cook landed at the mouth of the Waimea River on January 20, 1778. Cook was the first European reported to have sighted the Hawaiian Islands.

The Great Barrier Reef is the world's largest coral reef system composed of over 2,900 individual reefs and 900 islands stretching for over 2,300 kilometres over an area of approximately 344,400 square kilometres The reef is located in the Coral Sea, off the coast of Queensland, Australia.

The Great Barrier Reef can be seen from outer space and is the world's biggest single structure made by living organisms. This reef structure is composed of and built by billions of tiny organisms, known as coral polyps. It supports a wide diversity of life and was selected as a World Heritage Site in 1981. CNN labelled it one of the seven natural of the world. The Queensland National Trust named it a state icon of Queensland.

The 74 Whitsunday Islands are located between the northeastern coast of Queensland, Australia, and the Great Barrier Reef, a vast coral reef suitable for marine life. Most of the islands are uninhabited. They are characterized by dense tropical forest, hiking trails and white sand beaches. On the mainland, the city of Airlie Beach is the heart of the region.

Fraser Island, off the east coast of Queensland, Australia, is the largest sand island in the world and extends 120 km. The views are magnificent from Indian Head, a rocky peak at the eastern tip of the island, and from the Cathedrals, sandy cliffs with amazing colors. It is a popular destination for camping and ecotourism with beaches and bathing sites such as McKenzie Lake, Wabby Lake and other freshwater ponds.

Taronga Zoo is an Australian zoological park located in New South Wales, in the city of Sydney. Officially inaugurated on October 7, 1916, it is located on the shores of Sydney Harbor in the suburb of Mosman.

For this second week, william proposed to me to live with aborigines, which I obviously accepted !

It was a verry verryyyy great adventure.

Story of aborigines till today:

The Australian Aborigines are the first humans known to have populated the mainland. Together with the natives of Torres Strait, they constitute the indigenous population of this state of Oceania. Today they are approximately 649 171 in Australia.

In 1770, Lieutenant James Cook "took possession" of two-thirds of Australia for Britain against the orders of King George III stipulating that he must first conclude a treaty with the native population. In 1788, the First Fleet of British settlers arrived in Sydney. At that time Australia was peopled by 250 tribes, occupying the whole continent, each with its own language, laws, and tribal boundaries; it is the oldest surviving culture on earth. The first governor, Arthur Phillip, was charged with establishing relations with the Aborigines and living in friendship and kindness with them but European diseases, alcohol and colonial expansion quickly had a destructive effect on the indigenous population.

Bennelong was an Aboriginal from Eora, in the Port Jackson area, who was kidnapped by settlers and served as the first middleman between British settlers and Aborigines when Europeans arrived in Australia. Bennelong and a friend went with Phillip to England in 1792, making them the first Australian Aborigines to visit Europe.

In 1803, British settlers left New South Wales to settle on the Van Diemen Land which became a separate colony in 1826 and home to 6,000 Aborigines. In 1828, martial law was declared in the colony as a result of conflicts between British settlers and Aborigines. George Augustus Robinson is sent to the island to try to bring back the peace helped by Truganini, an Aboriginal woman with whom he befriends. The Aborigines are sent to Flinders Island where they are promised shelter, food and security until calm returns. Unfortunately, many die from diseases imported by Europeans and survivors will never be allowed to return to their country. In 1873, Truganini, the last survivor of this group, was taken to Hobart. She died there in 1876.

The Australian colonies became self-governing in the 1850s. Men were allowed to vote in South Australia in 1856; in Victoria in 1857; in New South Wales in 1858, and in Tasmania in 1896. This included natives but they were not encouraged to register to vote. Queensland gained autonomy in 1859 and Western Australia in 1890, but these colonies denied natives any voice. All adult women in South Australia, including indigenous women, won the right to vote in 1895.

The Aborigines's reactions to the sudden arrival of British settlers were varied, but inevitably hostile, when settlers' presence led to competition for vital natural resources and British occupation of aboriginal lands. According to historian Geoffrey Blainey, during the colonization of Australia: "In a thousand isolated places there were occasional deaths by the gun and the spear. Even worse, smallpox, measles, flu and other new diseases swept from one indigenous community to another ... The main conqueror of the Aborigines was the disease and its ally, the demoralization. " European diseases killed Aborigines in large numbers and land occupation, accompanied by the grabbing or destruction of food resources, caused famines.

In the 20th century the Australian colonies voted to federate under a national constitution in 1901. Section 41 of the constitution denied the right to vote at the federal level to Aboriginals unless they were registered on state electoral lists. Some states allowed Aborigines to vote and others did not.

In 1967, Prime Minister Harold Holt organized a referendum to include Aborigines in the national census. He won the support of over 90% of voters. In 1966, Vincent Lingiari, a former Aborigine Gurindji, first brought a claim to Wavehill's "Station" in the Northern Territory, demanding equal pay from others, and later protested for rights to their land. country.

In 1971, Neville Bonner became the first indigenous member of the federal Parliament, sitting as a Liberal Party senator for Queensland. Aborigines were elected in the Northern Territory and Queensland Parliaments in 1974. Ernie Bridge was the first indigenous member of the Western Australia Parliament in 1980 and was the first to obtain a ministry in a government. Since a partial restitution of land from 1976, many Aborigines have returned to live on the premises of their homeland ancestors from whom they had been hunted.

On May 26, 1998, Aboriginal and non-Indigenous Australians gathered in front of Parliament to sign a register in which the aboriginal people were asked to forgive. More than 24,000 signatures are collected, which is why Sorry Day, the day of forgiveness, is created. Every year, a large number of Australians take part in a march to celebrate this day.

Their relationship with nature:

During this week, I learned a lot from aboriginals, especially about their relationship with nature. Australian Aborigines protect the totemic sites. It is in these sites that little spirits are reproduced. Killing an animal for food is not harmful because the little spirits will regenerate it. Australian Aborigines do not distinguish between what would be natural and what would be cultural. In their world everything is both natural and cultural. The aborigines live in communion with the nature, for that they are constructed houses with natural materials that they find themselves.

About their art:

The Aborigines are remarkable painters, on bark in the Northern Territories, on fabrics and canvases in the central desert. The drawings and figures they paint all have a very particular meaning related to the dream mythology and can be likened to a form of writing. With the exception of rock paintings, most Aboriginal works were ephemeral: body paintings, sand drawings, ground plant paintings.

During this travel, I discove also their music, Didgeridoo practice, a primitive instrument prized by a fringe of Western youth. Music does not exist apart from the ritual or ceremony it accompanies or rhythm. It has a totemic or shamanic function that involves both the individual and the community.

At the end of this week, I realized how vast the gap between the aboriginal world and ours is because we all have what we want and we still find a way to complain while they have nothing to do with us and live happily, in harmony. We are looking to break their spaces to enlarge our, but we do not see that their culture is precious to our world.

Australia's travel were for me, an unbelievable experience, I learned about real life, communion with nature, respect for others. I lived two weeks in harmony, I discovered a new culture, which I hope will continue for many centuries.

I lived unforgettable moments with people with huge hearts, I created links indefinable with strangers who welcomed me as a member of their family.

That's why I decided, after my baccalaureate, to take a sabbatical year in order to go help this beautiful people, who really deserves that we are interested in them.

I have also visited magnificent monuments, each more beautiful than the other, with incredible stories and myths.

For that I want to say thank verry much Australia, I love you.

THE END