American students experience Butchulla culture

A group of students from New York State has travelled to Hervey Bay to study a new Australian Indigenous course being offered by USQ Fraser Coast.

The On Country Learning: Indigenous Knowledge through Butchulla Culture course was launched on Monday June 21.

Members of the local Indigenous community, Joe Gala and Joyce Bonner, gave the students a welcome to Butchulla Country with traditional song and dance.

Head of the USQ School of Humanities and Communications, Professor Bryce Barker, said the intensive four-week course was unique and quite unlike most other indigenous courses in Australian.

'It is unique in that it centres on a specific Aboriginal cultural group, the Butchulla, using their knowledge and country as learning tools to understand Aboriginal Australia from a specific local cultural perspective,' Professor Barker said.

This week Professor Barker and USQ Fraser Coast’s Executive Officer of Indigenous Development, Christine Young, are teaching the students about Australian Aboriginal history and life before and after colonisation.

The focus is on historical and social contexts of contemporary Indigenous Australians and the impact of colonialism on Indigenous societies globally.

Following the week-long introduction to Aboriginal culture the students will be taught by Butchella people.

They will attend lectures and workshops in the classroom and do field trips to cultural sites such as Fraser Island, Scrub Hill, Mt Bauple and the Booral Fish Traps.

The new course is being studied as part of the Study Aboard program. The students, all from the Suny College at Brockport in the State of New York, will receive accreditation for the course toward their degrees back in the United States.

Erich Montfort, 21, said he had chosen to study the course because he was studying an art major and was interested in Indigenous art.

'I’d like to get a better understanding of Aboriginal art,' he said.

Twenty-one-year-old Brittany Hughes and Courtney Mrowcynski, 20, chose the course because it seemed interesting and was something different to anything else they had studied.

Sahrah Vanderburgh, 22, is doing a business major but has always been interested in anthropology and cultural studies.

'I figured this was a great opportunity,' she said.