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First Nations cultures

Tellin' Country Logan

By Administrator | 27 September 2013

It's been such a cool week hanging out in my hometown of Logan. I was based at the Logan Central Library facilitating Tellin’ Country workshops with Indigenous children and young people to create stories about their country/home/neighbourhood. The library there is always busy and a great hub of activity.

I was joined by Kaylah Tyson, Aboriginal hiphop artist who is also from Logan and super talented Luka Lesson, spoken word poet, who worked on creating poems/rhymes with participants. Once we had written a good story we would record the audio then make a stop motion animation video on iPads.

It was perfect timing for the Yugambeh Totem exhibition to be at the library. We used the exhibition as inspiration for our stories. Participants chose an animal totem to be characters in their stories. We used the animal language names from the exhibition and used the Yugambeh language app to find other language words to incorporate in our stories.

We had Rory O’Connor for the Yugambeh Museum come along to the first workshop. All the kids were mesmerised as he shared a really cool dreaming story about the Logan area. I’m hoping to record and animate this story for the Our Dreaming exhibition too.

A core group of four boys and four girls attended the workshops and they worked together to create stories and animate them. The boys told a story about a couple of goannas that go to battle over a princess, while the girls told a story about a willy wagtail that saved a fresh water turtle. Over the course of a week we wrote stories and rhymes, drew pictures, cut out shapes, did stop-motion animation and used an iPad app called toontastic to create a cartoon.

I'm going to miss the loud, energetic and outspoken boys and the shy, well-mannered girls that I met this week. I hope to work with them again in the not too distant future.

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