It’s less than two weeks until our first excursion of the year, and we’re all getting quite excited! We know that our visit to Ballarat will focus on a time in Australia’s past in the 1850’s, and we have started to brainstorm what we already know about this time in history and what questions we have about life in the Gold Rush Era. Students talked about what they knew already, and then looked closely at photographs that depicted life in Ballarat during this time. Students identified things in the photos that looked different to what we might see in present day, such as clothes, transport, housing, buildings, equipment and tools, and how people cooked food.
Students came up with a few wonderings, that we hope to research in more detail in the coming weeks:
What is the process of looking and digging for gold? What different equipment is needed and what is it called?
How long did the Gold Rush last?
What did the soldiers do? Were they keeping people save, or stopping people from stealing the gold?
Do the gold miners keep the gold for themselves or work for someone else?
What was school like for children in the 1850’s?
We noticed that people in our pictures were not using electricity, and that led us to wonder – when was electricity invented?
We know that there was a rush, or influx, of people into Australia during this time – but where did they come from?
We also started to read an interesting comic that tells the story of the Gold Rush in Australia and the Eureka Stockade – and from this we have already learnt information about what life was like for the diggers that will help us when we get to Sovereign Hill, but again, came up with more questions, in particular one that left the Year 2 Neighbourhood divided – was the licence fee for the diggers fair?
