About Australia: Just a Beginning

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I’m really not sure where to begin. This is about an article I wrote several years ago (1995) about Cape York Peninsula in Australia. At that particular time, I remember that I was very fascinated with Australia and had it in my future plans to some day visit that country, but never have. I did a lot of research back then though, and my fascination has continued down through the years. One of the reasons I was always interested in Australia was because of the Alice River and Alice Springs, since that is one of my names. (Alice) I had also read the book, “A Town Like Alice” and actually watched the TV series when I happened to find it in a video store one day. I still have that video. Since it was a series, the video is over 5 hours long and I watched it all in one sitting. I liked it but didn’t really learn a lot about Australia from watching it. At the time I started doing my research on Australia, the Aborigines had been able to obtain some “rights” concerning land claims and were hoping to reclaim and preserve their way of life. I was intrigued, after watching a documentary and wanted to learn more about this VAST continent. The documentary included information about the endangered dugongs, closely related to the manatee, that I had seen on a visit to Florida. In fact, that’s what sparked my interest in the documentary in the first place, as I recall. The Aboriginals, who were classified as “hunter-gatherers” were allowed by LAW to “harvest” a limited number of dugongs, even though they were an endangered species and still are on that list. It’s really a complicated arrangement to protect the endangered species and at the same time protect the food source of the Aboriginals who were hunting these animals long before Australia had ANY laws or government restrictions. While, both man and beast are important, it’s an ongoing dilemma, as man continues to destroy animal habitats in his quest to live in bigger houses and to carelessly destroy forests and natural areas in order to build shopping centers and build highways, damming up rivers and causing massive extinction of hundreds of animals, birds and sea creatures. But, that’s another story. I am going to hopefully write, in the coming weeks, about some things I learned about Australia, and post them here on MyLot. My fascination with Australia is never-ending and it’s such a HUGE continent, I could write hundreds of posts and never cover it all. So, I want to encourage those who live in Australia or wherever you live, to write posts too and tell us what you know about the area in which you live and other places of interest in your country. I would imagine though, since Australia is so VAST, that many people there, exactly like people here in the USA, have not traveled in their own country to a great extent. I am happy to say that I have actually visited many places of interest in the USA, having been in 44 states, including Alaska and Hawaii. And yet there are many more places that I haven’t visited in my own country. Tell me ONE THING of interest that you know about the area where you live. One thing that would make me want to visit your area. Everyone can contribute to this challenge and give us something of interest to read about where YOU live.