Happy Constitution Day! 9 July 2009

After the National Museum and National Gallery on the Tuesday, Wednesday saw us going in to the National Archives to join with them in a day to celebrate our Constitution becoming law.  They had these little cupcakes on hand as part of the party.

Then the boys went on a "History Mystery" tour.  They were given booklets and had to look through the "Memory of a Nation" exhibition and using clues, find the answer needed on each page.  I found this fascinating as there was such a broad cross section of Australian life covered in these pages. 

They looked at artefacts, watched short clips of old film footage, old slides and some things on the computer as well as…

looking at the Constitution and related documents, like this one – Queen Victoria’s assent.

After a morning tea break, we went in to see another exhibition I’d been wanting to visit for a while, called "Women Transported: Life in Australia’s Female Convict Factories"

This painting is by Augustus Earle of Women outside a Convict Factory.

Here’s the information about the exhibition:

An estimated one in five Australians has an ancestor who spent time in a convict female factory, but very little material survives from these women. Their contribution has been largely ignored, yet they are the ‘mothers of the nation’ – women with grit who survived the dire conditions of late 18th and early 19th century colonial Australia.

Women Transported: Life in Australia’s Convict Female Factories, a confronting and inspiring exhibition from the Parramatta Heritage Centre, reveals the harsh lives of women who were incarcerated. The oldest and most famous of Australia’s 12 female factories was in Parramatta, New South Wales and opened in 1804.

The heroic personal accounts of women torn from the lives they knew, separated from their children, and often assigned to inhumane colonial masters and mistresses are celebrated through original works of art, films and interactives.

We were all affected by learning about the plight of these women and given were had recently spent time on the early history of Australia’s colonial days, it was an opportune time to see this.

These boots were made in a female colonial factory.

Our "holidays of learning" were not at an end though…

Posted on on July 9th, 2009