Thank you to Owen L, Owen C., Franzi, Wesley, Sophie, Hugo P., Kat, Reuben S. for collaborating on today’s blog post.
Today we visited the Immigration Museum and Sandridge bridge. This is connected to our Welcome Inquiry and was a wonderful opportunity to get out into the community and extend our understanding of the stories people carry with them to Australia. We have been learning that there are many reasons people come to Australia and each new person builds and shapes Australia.
Welcoming people who are immigrating is important, rather than focusing on differences we can come together to build Australia. This is really important because when people come to Australia they may face challenges they may have to learn a new language and things that happen here. We know that everyone, except the first nations people, have an immigration story about when they came to Australia. We realised that most of us have family members that immigrated to Australia. We have come from everywhere for many reasons.
During our excursion we split into two groups. One group started at Immigration Museum, we saw many objects that people had when they came to Australia. We learnt that they had to go into a room and be interviewed by immigration officers who asked the questions to hear their stories. There was a video that showed us about the different reasons people leave their homes to come to Australia. People move because of many reasons, war, conflict, disaster, family and and in search of a better life.
The other part of the excursion was our visit to Sandridge bridge, we got into pairs and got a country to study. With our paper we had to write about our country. We saw sculptures called the travelers which represent different eras of migration to Australia. One of the activities we did on our paper was to compare two countries, our research one and another one. We used a Venn diagram to study and compare them. We learnt that the Victorian Government had put the countries there to show all the countries people came from and why they immigrated, this is an important part of our story as Victorians.
Our excursion was a great way to deepen our understanding of welcome, and provided context for our understanding of our own stories.
