This sounds like a positive change, definitely a much better grounding in Australian history than I received at that age. It is pretty wild that you can live in a colonial country without ever being taught what colonisation means for indigenous peoples but that is the world we’ve been living in until recently.

  • Stache_@lemmy.ml
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    7 days ago

    I studied abroad in Australia for a semester (from the United States) and took an Aboriginal Studies course and was incredibly glad I did. It was crazy to see the parallels to how the Native Americans were treated/colonized here in the Americas. Truly barbaric stuff. They’ve got something called the Lost Generation where pretty much all of the children born during a certain time period were forcibly taken from their families and forced to become “civilized”.

    It was really cool learning about how the aboriginals would do these “prescribed burns” where they would purposefully start small wildfires to burn away the undergrowth, which would in turn enrich the soil with lots of carbon. Really neat stuff