Bush students enjoy taste of ‘Big Smoke’

Indigenous Elder Uncle Thomas talks to the students taking part in the You Show me Your World tour at South Bank campus.
Indigenous Elder Uncle Thomas Sebasio talks to the students taking part in the You Show me Your World Tour.

Twenty Indigenous children are gettinga taste of life outside their remote communities as they embark on an 11-day tour throughout south-east Queensland this month.

The Years Six and Seven students from the Gulf communities of Doomadgee, Normanton, Karumba, Burktown and Mornington Island, arrived in Brisbane on October 31 for the Show Me Your World Tour.

The tour, an initiative of the Waanyi Aboriginal Corporation and Griffith University’s School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science, will take in Brisbane City, the Sunshine, Gold and Tweed Coasts and Byron Bay.

“At each destination, the children will interact with local Elders, promoting a sense of their connectedness with Indigenous Australians and their belonging in unfamiliar landscapes,” said Kerrie Foxwell Norton from the School of Humanities, Languages and Social Science.

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Students taking part in the You Show Me Your World with (back row), Deputy Vice Chancellor (Academic) Professor Martin Betts, Dawn Aplin from the Waanyi Aboriginal Corporation and Kerrie Foxwell-Norton from the School of Humanities, Languages & Social Science

“The tour is not only a wonderful experience for the students but also an incentive to attend school.”

It’s the sixth year the tour has been held and Ms Foxwell says it’s been an overwhelming success with teachers, community members and students.

“The tour broadens horizons and is an investment in a generation of young Indigenous Australians.”

GUMURRI Student Support Unit Manager Jane Wallace said the tour was important in creating opportunities and “planted the seed for inspiring the lives of young Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their communities.”