WOMEN'S STUDIES WEEK 1- JOURNAL

JOURNAL-WEEK 1

25th July 2007

It was the 25th of July 2007,a beautiful sunny day, very unusual for winter but this lovely weather inspired me to leave home early for school. I arrived on campus twenty minutes early full of anticipation and excitement. Naturally, I was a bit apprehensive not knowing what to expect with the new course, but all that was eradicated when I realized that the lecturer was Karen, who had taught me in one of my previous courses.

The other ladies kept streaming in one by one; finally we were set to begin. Our lecturer gave an overview of the course with guidelines of the course content. She handed out the lecture program and we talked about the following;
• The scope and content of Women’s Studies 1 and locate and evaluate online information
• Assessment
• What is History?
• Video- on Women of the sun- Alinta the Flame.

My feeling about the course is one of excitement. I am passionate about searching for information on the Internet, since it is a way of broadening my scope of learning and being abreast with the times considering the fact that I am from a different cultural background, there is still so much to learn. Am particularly excited about the Aboriginal Women and am happy to be doing this course because it will give an insight into their history. I also have a lot of ongoing “self talk” questions, in my head about them and am hoping the course will help me answer some of them, if not all.
Having said this, there are aspects of the course that I am apprehensive about, that is setting up the blog and journal writing. Actually, it’s not the blog setting per say, past experience has taught me a thing about loosing stuff on my blog. I set up a blog for one of my courses –Women and the Internet, and I kept loosing my work, it was a frustrating experience. I was unable to figure out why this kept happening.

Since History is said to be the description of things that happened in the past, the idea that History is open to interpretation would only confuse facts, and because people have different interpretations to the same event and are bound to interpret the same event differently, we would never have the correct facts if History were open to interpretation.
I have been witness to a lot of misrepresentation of facts, but one that I remember vividly was an incident, which occurred a few years ago, back home [Ghana]. My step dad collapsed and was rushed to the hospital, the two women who were present at the scene delivered the news to us, his children, one said he died on the spot the other said he died when he was being taken to hospital. It happened that he was not dead at all. This is an example of how differently people can recount same events, so imagine History being recounted in this manner.

In the video entitled, Women of the sun-Alinta the Flame, traditional Aboriginal culture was portrayed in all aspects of their lives. I learnt that the Aboriginal people held a deep spiritual connection to their land dating back tens of thousands of years ago, and would not let go of any part of it to any one. The youth held their elders in high esteem; they would usually kneel to talk to them, as a sign of respect, the young girls had good moral values, also Alinta was taught by her mother who in turn helped to teach the other girls, I realized also that even though the women joined the men at the beach, they sat away from the men. What I learnt about marriage also is, even though the man proposed to Alinta she was kept at her parents home, the man keeps coming with gifts to see her for a period of time before the customary marriage ceremony is performed and finally he is allowed to take her away with him to his home.

The role of the men in the tribe is to look for food for their families and protect the women and children. The men went hunting; they used the spears to attack and the shield to defend. They took decisions on family related issues. The older women on the other hand, took care of the young girls, taught them about their culture, life in general and also to dance. The older women played an important role in the decision-making process by giving suggestions and advising the men and their opinion is taken into account.
The relationship between the men and women is mutual and cordial except that the men sat in their on groups away from the women. The gender roles in Australia today differ completely from that of the Aborigines in this movie.


After watching the video, I empathise with the tribe; reason being that, these were simple people who were leaving a quite life and minding their own business until the convicts and settlers arrived and threw everything out of proportion for them, killed everyone except Alinta and her child and took their land. I find this hard to comprehend.