A Busy Week!

This past week has been busy, I had a lot of assignments due this Friday, but I've finished them all early which feels great! Today in my Indigenous class we had another guest speaker from Kuranda, but this one focused on Aboriginal culture and customs. He discussed how there were 5 neighboring Aboriginal groups around his particular group; some lived in the rainforest and the others lived on the coast. He mainly discussed the process of becoming a man, which I found to be very interesting and different from the American process of coming of age. The men are cut across their chest and the more cuts one has, the higher their status is. The most elite men also have cuts down their arms. A young adult's marriage is arranged by their grandparents and if they do not marry their chosen wife they will be stabbed in the thighs with spears. This may seem a bit harsh, but the punishments for disrespecting an elder and the chosen wife's family are severe. The chosen wives are usually very young and have just reached puberty when they are set to marry men sometimes a decade or so older than them. If a man's brother dies, he has to marry that wife as well and raise the children as his own brothers and sisters so that his brother's legacy lives on. The chosen wife is always from another group and it often takes the man a few days to walk to her location. Along the way there he is expected to hunt and prepare meat (usually kangaroo meat) for his future wife's family. After he arrives, his future father-in-law will throw spears at him and he is supposed to block them, which shows that he is brave and ready to become a man. The guest speaker brought in a variety of interesting Aboriginal objects, such as art, boomerangs, a spear and spear thrower, and also a device which was used as a communication device because it makes a loud whooshing sound when it is spun around. He also discussed some of the herbal medicines that his people used from the rainforest.
I have been reading some biographies from the library about Aborigines and I have found them all to be very moving and insightful. If anyone is interested in this topic and would like to do some reading, I'll post a list on the bottom right hand side of my blog site with some of the authors and titles. I'll also post a list of all of the towns that I have visited or will be visiting so that people can keep track of that as well! I have posted a lot of photos to my photo site....although it takes too long to post all of them...but I randomly add a few pictures to some of the old albums so feel free to look at those. I'll post the link here again: Australia Photos