Backbencher

Lecture 6, All Blacks v. Wallabies, discusses the founding mythologies of Australia and New Zealand. We learned about the Australian convict settlement and the New Zealand planned settlement.

I enjoyed hearing about Miriam Dixson and her book, The Real Matilda: Women Identity in Australia, 1788 to the Present. I looked a little further into this book and learned some interesting things. She worked with another woman Anne Summers who actually challenged the work of Manning Clark and said his work was somewhat inaccurate. Theses women worked to educate Australian women about the past and what women went through. We learned in class that degradation of men brought brutalization of women. Dixson and Summers tried to prove that females back then weren’t, “irredeemable whores.” It was interesting to learn about the gender differences across cultures.

We learned about some of the demographics in Australia and New Zealand. There was a turnaround in native populations. The Maori and Aborigine cultures were defying fatal contact. In the Anglo-Celtic nations there was a lack of diversity in settlement. There was also a wave of European immigrants after World War II. Finally we learned about Asian immigration, despite White Australian Policy, and Polynesian immigration in New Zealand.

It would be interesting to learn more about the women back then and how they were treated in Australia and New Zealand to how they are treated now. I wonder why people chose to immigrate to this new land and what exactly they were thinking. Today it seems strange to just pack up and leave to a whole new place but back I’m assuming that was just a part of life.