We carve our dreams into objects, large or small. The emotions we hold but fail to honour, we try to express through the things we create, trusting that they will outlive us when we are gone, trusting that they will carry something of us through the layers of time, like water seeping through rocks.

‘There Are Rivers in the Sky’ by Elif Shafak

In History in Class 9, the students examined the kaleidoscope of elements that have moved to create the modern world. In Class 10, the students are posed with the question; ‘How did things come to be as they are?’ In response to this, the study of ancient cultures and early human societies gives the student a far-reaching picture of the human experience in distant times and places.

During this Main Lesson, the students initially explored the role of the historian comparing it to that of a detective. Provided with the scenario of being part of a group from the future who have landed on the grounds of Parkerville Steiner College and Silver Tree with the job of investigating what happened on this site 300 years ago. The class walked through both campuses in order for the different student groups to identify a number of ‘artefacts’ which they had to be sketch and then use to deduce what might have happened here 300 years ago. Each student then wrote their own story incorporating the objects sketched. Despite each group having the same objects, every student’s story was vastly different in its interpretation of what the ‘artefacts’ were and what they might tell us about the past, which is similar to what happens when historians reconstruct the past.

From here the focus of the Main Lesson shifted to Australia with an exploration of Australia and the Aboriginal culture as an example of an early human society. We examined how Australia’s First Nations people were not a hunter-gatherer society as originally presented by the white settlers but rather a culture that farmed and built large villages with a focus on careful land management and conservation; safeguarding the land for future generations. There were some robust discussions around the reluctance to teach First Nations History in Australian schools and why there has been such an emphasis on the viewpoint that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people were only ever hunter-gatherers.

The Main Lesson culminated with two tasks; one of which was the painting of an Australian landscape, for which students were asked to integrate the 2025 National Reconciliation theme, ‘Bridging Now to Next’ and combine elements of this year's artwork. The second task was for students to work in pairs to come up with a design for a fish trap that could have been sustainably used to harvest fish to feed a small town of 2,000 people, 2000 years ago.

This Main Lesson allowed the Class 10 students to evaluate archaeological information to inform their understanding of early human relationships with nature and the environment. The focus on Australia allowed them to further explore the First Nations enduring relationship to the spirit, to the land and to each other.

Ethna Brave

English and Humanities Teacher