Tuesday 3 September 2019 was the annual TRAKZ Bring a Buddy cultural day.
Indigenous students from the Ngarigo community invited a non-indigenous friend to come along and learn about the local Ngarigo culture and environment.
It was the biggest turnout we have ever seen. Monaro High School’s Jnr AEC was in full attendance, each bringing along a friend to learn about an 80,000-year-old culture, along with students from surrounding primary schools, resulting in two big buses and a minibus to get the mob to the swamp.
After an hour of driving, half on-road and half off-road, we finally arrived at the Nunnock’s Swamp campground, deep in the bush with absolutely no phone signal. Time to reconnect with nature and learn some local knowledge from Richard Swaine!
After a quick morning tea, we headed off on our bushwalk to the swamp, seeing multiple different forms of native wildlife and trying some yummy bushtucker on the way. When we got to the swamp we noticed something that we didn’t expect… it was not swampy at all, not even wet. This really showed the devastation of the current drought we were facing and the government’s mismanagement of our natural waterways. Richard’s story hit home with a lot of the older students and the evidence was currently right in our faces.
We walked around the swamp, noticing a cute little wombat, but soon turned back around as our primary school students were getting a bit tired and cranky.
Back we travelled to the campground, high school students helping along the primary students, some getting the luxury of a piggyback! When we arrived, our lovely bus drivers had cooked us up a sausage sizzle on a traditional woodfire BBQ and we all enjoyed multiple sausage sandwiches!
To finish off the day, Richard showed us different artefacts, including the traditional way to start fire! Absolutely unreal!
We arrived back just in time for the end of the school day.
What a great day and looking forward to next year’s Bring a Buddy Day!
