Innholdsfortegnelse for November/December 2015 i Faces People, Places, and World Culture for Kids and Children

WHAT DO YOU THINK OF when you hear the term “the Outback”? Do you picture a desolate landscape teaming with kangaroos and crocodiles? In some ways, you are correct. The Australian Outback is about 2.5 million miles of desert and wilderness. Here are five facts to start you on your adventure! 1. The majority of houses in Coober Pedy are underground! That makes sense in a place where the daytime temperature can reach 114 degrees F. The town even features underground bookstores and restaurants. 2. Before the Ghan, a railroad that runs the length of Australia from north to south, goods were moved by camel caravan. Many of those first camels escaped and resulted in a large population of feral (wild) camels. In fact, the Outback is home to the…

For most of us who haven’t been lucky enough to visit the country of Australia, we think of it as a vast area with very few people or cities. Actually, Australia is one of the most urbanized countries in the world. But most of its population is concentrated in areas on its southern and eastern coasts or areas close to those coasts. The only exception is the city of Perth, which is on the southern west coast. Basically, everything else in the middle is the Australian Outback! That’s about 2.5 million miles of desert and wilderness, with only about 60,000 people who live there. So the Outback is not one single location, but the name for all of the empty, remote, huge distances of inland Australia. Not only does the…

The Ghan is a train that runs through Australia north-to-south or south-to-north, offering today’s travelers a few days journey through the Outback. Journeys begin or end in the tropical northern town of Darwin, as well as from the southern city of Adelaide, with a stop in the middle of the Outback in Alice Springs. The Ghan was the first railroad through the central deserts of Australia. The Australian government began planning for the Ghan in 1877, although construction for the first leg of the journey (about half-way up the continent) was completed in 1929. In 1929, the Ghan railway traveled just as far as Alice Springs (mid-Outback). In 1980, a new rail line was constructed, with more modern, durable materials, to the west of the original line. The new location…

Uluru is a huge rock jutting up from barren surroundings. The rock extends even farther below the surface of the ground although no one knows exactly how far. It is the second largest monolith in the world, the largest being Mount Augustus, also in Australia. It is believed to be 600-700 million years old. The surface is generally flat, but made up of valleys, ridges, caves, and odd shapes formed by erosion. Uluru is located close to the geographic center of Australia. To Aboriginal Australians the land is sacred and home to spirit ancestors. They do not climb the rock and ask that others do not either. Uluru is made of sandstone, a soft rock formed from sand. The sandstone is gray in color but the iron content in the…

When you imagine Australia’s Outback, the orange red earth and brilliant blue skies come to mind. It is a natural example of how contrasting colors make each other more vivid. Uluru makes a simple line across the horizon. Desert shrubs and grasses dot the landscape here and there. The Outback is the perfect inspiration to create an abstracted landscape painting. Unlike non-objective art, which is formed with colors and shapes, abstract paintings begin with viewing an object, in our case the Outback, and changing it or abstracting it in the painting. One way to abstract is to simplify the lines, shapes, and colors of the original object that the artist is painting. How about giving it a try? MATERIALS NEEDED: • Canvas• Acrylic paint• Chalk• Paint brushes and palettes STEP 1: INSPIRATION Look up…

Location: The Australian Outback makes up most of the central part of the Australian continent. It does not have fixed boundaries. Area: 2.5 million square miles (about 70 percent of Australia’s total landmass) Population: 60,000 Terrain: Central areas are mostly desert, but the Outback also includes tropical areas in the north. Climate: Deserts see temperatures as high as 120 degrees F during the day and 15 degrees F at night. Temperatures in the tropical north are not as extreme.…

COOBER PEDY — A MOONSCAPE? Visitors to Coober Pedy always comment on how different this place is from many others in Australia. The lack of grass, or vegetation in general, is striking. The pinkish-orange soil is something to see. And woo-ee, when the summer sun beats down on this Outback outpost, it is fierce. Just how hot does it get? Temperatures commonly reach 114°F (46°C)! Talk about toasty! People often compare Coober Pedy’s landscape to a moonscape. About nine miles (15 kilometers) from the town’s downtown row of shops and businesses lies a place called Moon Plain. Walking on the soft soil here feels strange underfoot. Its vast expanse of rocky plains is littered with clear gypsum crystals – and even some gemstones. It’s hard to believe that more than…

People living in the Outback want to cull the camels. The Outback is dry and scorching during the day and cold at nights. Camels have thick fur on the top of their body and thin fur elsewhere. The thick fur provides shade and thin fur helps the camel to stay cool. Camels have flat, large feet which keep them from sinking in the desert sand. Food and water are scarce in the Outback. Camels can go for a long time without food and water. They waste little water through sweat or urine. And when the desert storms blow, the double layer of eyelashes block out the sand. In every way, the camel is perfect for the desert. But, there is a problem. The Australian Outback is spread over 2.5 million…

Living in Australia’s Outback is an amazing experience, but it also can be isolating if you’re a school-aged kid who is part of an indigenous group, or living on a cattle station, on a camel farm, in a national park, a mining camp, a remote police station, or in a resort for tourists. There aren’t usually enough kids for a regular school, so since 1944, the Alice Springs School of the Air has provided students in remote locations with an education while allowing them to stay in their communities. Before the school opened, kids either completed their lessons by mail, with no real interaction with their teachers, or left home to go to boarding school. Lessons by mail could take months to be returned to teachers, corrected, and sent back…

Open Wide! When it’s snack time, do you reach for a bag of chips, fresh fruit, or yogurt? How about trying a handful of trail mix made with nutty wattle seeds and raw witchetty grubs? If you’re super hungry, why not tuck into a cup of hearty ’roo tail stew or a few goanna nuggets? Now don’t go all wobbly, mate! These are just some examples of traditional Aboriginal food, or as they say down under, “bush tucker!” Bush tucker refers to any type of food found in the wild, from herbs and flowers, to mammals and insects. For more than 40,000 years, Aboriginal people have survived off the land. Until recently, they never tended livestock or raised crops on farms. Semi-nomadic, Aboriginals often traveled miles every day in search…

Quokkas, bilbies, numbats, emus, and thorny devils. Does this sound like some strange cast of characters from a cartoon? Or a list of foods you definitely don’t want to eat? Guess again . . . these are all animals that you may encounter if you visit the Australian Outback. The Outback might have a reputation as a barren, empty wilderness of desert and not much else. But the truth is that it’s home to many amazing animals, who find the environment there to be just what they like. These animals can be cute, like the quokka (known as the world’s happiest marsupial), dangerous (Australia has more poisonous snakes than nonpoisonous snakes), or just plain unusual (such as marsupials who carry their babies in a pouch). There are also birds, lizards,…

Although the Australian Outback abounds with wide open spaces and unspoiled beauty, it can be a very dangerous place. People get lost or stranded there every year, and some do not make it out alive to tell their stories. One Outback tour operator refers to the region’s summer heat as “horrendous,” and says, “If you break down in that heat, you’re dead meat. You have nowhere to hide, no air conditioning, no shade, and no shelter.” Sadly, Ernie and Emma Page and their three children learned this lesson the hard way. During the summer of 1963, they became lost after taking a wrong turn. This can happen very easily in the Outback where some roads are little more than dirt tracks. After the family’s car ran out of gas, they…

CHARACTERS: Elder, Alinta, Kangaroo, Crocodile Man, Emu, Bird Woman Elder: It is time to settle, child. You have been busy all day, walking to the waterhole and grinding up seeds to make damper. Alinta: I do not want to stop moving, grandfather. The sun has gone down, and it is cold. If I stop, I will freeze to death. Elder: Ah, but the fire is warm, young one. And I have a story to tell. Alinta: A story? What about, grandfather? Elder: It is about fire. Alinta: Fire? I have known about fire since I was a tiny girl cradled in my coolamon. Elder: Ah, you think you know, little one, but I will tell you of a time when people had no fire. (Alinta sits by the fire.) Long…