Journey to Oz

Today I am doing a history review of the Anzacs and the aftermath of Australia after World War I.

To do this, we went to the National Archives of Australia. There we learned that Australia in the great world war we call World War I sent a lot more troops than any other country that assisted Britain and its allies. I took down a couple notes to share with you.

In the war, no one could trust enemy natives; what I mean is is that Australia arrested all of the Germans and Austrians in Australia, even if they were citizens of Australia.

Killed/wounded soldiers:

British---50.71%

Canada---49.74%

New Zealand---59.01%

India---12.77%

And Australia---65%.

So what this means is that 40% of adult men in Australia went to fight in World War I. And 65% of those 40% were killed or wounded. So Australia was left with a big hole; many of its men were simply gone, or could no longer work.

The government helped pay for the medical bills of the wounded, and the funerals of the dead. The total cost for Australia was immense. The cost made Australia plunge into the great depression. The soldiers who died in the war were buried where they fell, and that could be in Egypt or Turkey or Europe, which few families could afford to see. We read some letters from mothers of dead soldiers who said they only wished they could see where their boy was buried. But the government would not help the families travel to see these cemeteries.

Then when the depression hit, the government cut back on its payments to the families of the dead and wounded. Military families were forced to live in the streets. Men looked for work everywhere. The father/mother would leave home for work for most of the day to afford to put anything on the table. One job I found interesting was the prickly pear job. Back then, prickly pears, similar to cactus, were all over the land. The cattle couldn't eat them, and neither could they travel through them. To destroy the prickly pears, workers would take the eggs of this special moth and put them into tubes and stick them on the cactus. When the eggs hatched into caterpillars, they would eat the innards of the prickly pears and destroy them. Then a fungus came that destroyed the rest of the prickly pears in Australia.

Although we, as Americans, remember WWII as the more important war, WWI caused much more suffering for Australia in terms of money, lives, and grief.

This is my brother John and my Mom in front of the Australian Archives building:

Another history day. Today I am writing about the Modern Era of Australia.

After the Japanese invasion of World War II, the government decided that the population of Australia was too small to defend itself well; they wanted immigrants to come into Australia. They wanted 50% of the immigrants too be British, and the other 50% could come from anywhere as long as they're white. In fact the one guy who proposed this, Arthur Calwell, was racist. So the Immigrants came; they came from England, Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia, Swiss...And they were all useful for work.

During the second half of the 20th century, Australia had very close relations with the US. In fact, they were one of the few American allies who helped in the Vietnam War. In the Vietnam war, Australia sent nearly 50,000 troops of which about 500 were killed, and 2,069 were wounded. The anti-war proposals from the younger generations who did not like the Vietnam War caused great unrest. These weren't just like the talking proposals, people were boycotting, doing destruction and all those sort of things.

The book that I read was not too strong on the modern era, so I'll come back to the modern era with some actual good stuff when I start my new book on Australian history.

Okay, I'm not doing a history post today because I did science instead of history today. But we did go to this nature reserve. This is a place where people can hike to look at some wild life. We were the only people there; probably because people were at work and such. It was said that this reserve had koala bears which are what my mom was hoping to see. We saw a bunch of cockatoos, pelicans, magpies, ducks, geese, and we also saw a water moccasin. Water moccasins are poisonous snakes that hang around the water, or in the water. We had lots of great hikes; even though we didn't get to see any koalas.

But I believe that one of the highlights of the day was the time that we went to the playground. Nobody was there; but there were several emus. Emus are very interesting; they somewhat look like ostriches, but they have different colored feathers, shorter wings, and they have a queer sound. They sound like lions; The growling/purring sound that lions make. I found out something about them; they love cheetos. There were about 4 or 5 emus, one of them was bold and stole 1/4 of Rosies' PB&J sandwich; it was then that I started giving it cheetos and it absolutely loved us. It just ate sandwiches and cheetos. I gave some sandwiches to the other emus who became curious as well. They didn't fight over the food we gave them, they just tried to get them first.

We also saw some wallabies. Wallabies are like miniature kangaroos. I got out of the car alone and slowly edged towards the wallabies; there was a herd of about forty, and there were 4 that were very near our car. I got up to 3-5 yards away when I went back to the car. We went to a museum as well where we saw some live and stuffed animals. We saw some endangered frogs, huge pythons, and thorny lizards. There was even a stuffed platypus!

There was a frog that we saw that is highly endangered; They are the Corroborree Frogs. They are a high altitude frogs that are only 2 inches long and don't jump. They are almost extinct because of Kitchen Fungus. Kitchen Fungus infects their skin when they're a tadpole which causes these frogs sudden death. They are black frogs with yellow stripes. The stomach is also black but they have different patterns of white blotches which is how we tell these frogs apart individually. The nature reserve is breeding these frogs in captivity and holding on to them until they are about four years old which is when they release them in the wild. In this way, the frogs are kept safe during the tadpole stage and don't get the fungus. At the particular reserve that we went to, they have bred over a thousand Corroborree Frogs and hope to start releasing them into the wild soon.

Here is a Corroborree Frog:

I regret to inform you that I forgot to bring the camera. However, my mom says we will go back next week and bring the camera; I'll upload photos of all these sights then.