WINNERS OF ROUND TWO ANNOUNCED1st of February, 2010The Yarnup team were incredibly proud of all schools involved in Yarnup 2009. Thank you to everyone who got involved. Two schools in particular created the most beautiful Yarnup. As a result, they deserve amazing recognition. The two schools are: Biraban Public School and Hume Public School. Congratulations to both of these schools. Your heartfelt energy and dedication to Yarnup have been inspiring. Already the students and teachers at your school are making Australia a better place. Thank you for all your efforts, your dreams and your actions. WINNERS OF ROUND ONE ANNOUNCED1st of October, 2008The Yarnup team had a tough time deciding upon the winners for the first pilot program. The entries submitted were all very beautiful and heartfelt. There were two joint winners and our congratulations goes to the following two schools: Mudgee High & the Brisbane Water Secondary College Local Management Group Mudgee High submitted a beautiful artwork and photo album full of heartfelt comments about their Yarnup experience in Mudgee and the Brisbane Water Secondary College Local Management Group submitted a breathtaking short film. Congratulations to you both. Uncle Bob is already excited about visiting your schools later this year!  The Mudgee High School Painting. Title: "Yayalanha winhangarra gulbarra yalmambirra" (Talk, listen, hear, understand and teach.) Medium: Acrylics Artists: Tirikee and the Mudgee High students. Description of the painting: "This painting represents the journey of the Yarnup team at Mudgee High School has gone through. We are in Wiradjuri country which is known as the land of the three rivers - the Macquarie (Wambuul), the Murrumdigee (Marrambidya) and the Lachlan (Galari). We are on the north eastern border of Wiradjuri country. The eastern border is represented by the lines on the right hands side of the picture. The two goannas (Girrawaa) represented the totem of the Wiradjuri people. Mudgee means "nest in the hills" in Wiradjuri and is represented by the lines around the meeting place in the middle of the picture. The red hands are those of the Yarnup team. The white and black lines represent our two mobs coming together to sit, share and learn. The gold dots on the these lines represent the knowledge that we have brought with us. Once we start to share and talk the boundaries of black and white begin to blur. The large dots around the circle represent the sharing of knowledge and the dots going out from the centre circle represent how we have shared our new knowledge with others." The Brisbane Water Secondary College Local Management Group submitted a short film about Tedagilcupo, which is a dreamtime story from the local area. The story of the film explained to the audience the importance of working together as a community which is exactly what the schools at Woy Woy did during the Yarnup program. It is a beautiful film that captured the essence of cooperation and learning that happened at Woy Wory this year.  The Logo of Woy Woy's film and Yarnup project is very significant. It is designed around the seven schools which participated in Yarnup. The seven tri-circles below the tree represent the wider community. Everyone in the community is linked and held together by water, which is not only the lifeblood for all living things but also the theme of the film about Tedagilcupo. We would also like to congratulate the following schools on their heartfelt work in particular: Loreto Kirribilli (A beautiful artwork that captured the beauty of the Yarnup experience) Tempe High (A wonderful photo essay about the students interviewing the local Aboriginal people) Waverley College (A collection of beautiful sculptures and artworks from year 7 - 10 students).  The Kirribilli Painting. Very beautiful!  The Waverley College artworks.Absolutely stunning! Our Yarnup team would like to thank every school that participated in the first round of the pilot program. We feel very blessed to have been supporting you through the program. We are also very proud of the relationships you have begun and the friendships you have formed with the local Aboriginal communities throughout NSW. Through correspondence with both students and teachers it is clear to us that Australian students involved in Yarnup are really engaging with their local Aboriginal community as well as history from an Indigenous perspective. We are so excited with these results and thank you for allowing our Yarnup team to be part of your program. We are also here for you in 2009 should you wish to extend Yarnup in your school. TJILPI WARA VISITS SCHOOLS31st March, 2008 The highest lore man from Uluru, Billy Wara visited schools involved in the Yarnup program this week. Tjilpi Wara is the grandfather of Yarnup's Indigenous Liaison Officer, Wadi Wiriyanjara. "He just loves kids. His eyes light up whenever kids are around and the kids love him too. I've had to explain to my grandfather that it is now time for us Anangu to teach the children of the Pirinpa (white man) about our culture. He's starting to understand it's really important for us to teach our culture now. Coming to the city has been a real eye opener for him," says Wadi.  Everyone at Yarnup felt honoured to have Billy Wara on our team. "It is so wonderful to be able to provide Australian children with the opportunity to meet such a noble and honourable man,"says the director of the Yarnup program, Melanie Hogan. "The pilot program is running wonderfully thus far."Yarnup's project co-ordinator, Shelley Pedersen, says "It's inspiring to see the kids so interested in learning about Aboriginal culture. They're so motivated to get involved!" 'CONNECTEDNESS' WITH CULTUREJuly 9, 2008 (Extracted from The Weekly, Mudgee)
 ABORIGINAL CULTURE,LIFE AT THE HEART OF PILOT SCHOOL PROGRAM(Extracted from The Catholic Weekly, 27 April, 2008 by Brian Davies)An award winning documentary film, Kanyini, about Aboriginal life and culture since the arrival of Europeans in Australia, is now the core of a pilot school program – called Yarnup – unfolding the issues for the schools involved in the pilot program, including a number of Catholic colleges. Each school screening is accompanied by a visit by local Aboriginal community leaders or elders including a NSW elder, 'Uncle' Max and, recently, Tjilpi Wara, the highest man of the lore from Uluru who speaks no English and made his first trip to Sydney for a screening at Waverley College. Kanyini, produced and directed by Melanie Hogan, premiered at the 2006 Sydney Film Festival and went on to win a number of national and international documentary gold medal awards for "its great beauty, storyline and mood." Screening and discussing the film in the participating schools is stage one of the pilot program. In stage two the students are expected to establish a connection with local Aboriginal communities. And, in stage three, they are expected to make their own small film of the interaction that takes place, or express it in photographs, art work and essays, or all three. The film is narrated and presented by Bob Randall who shone as a popular singer in the 1970s, including writing the song My Brown Skin Baby, They Took Him Away. In the film he also tells his own story: as a boy taken from his family in Central Australia and sent to live in Arnhem Land. Kanyini is now in the libraries of 1500 Australian schools, and the pilot, 'interactive' program, Yarnup, is being trialled in 32 NSW high schools. These include St Dominic's College, Penrith, the Loreto schools at Kirribilli and Normanhurst, with each school visited by local Aboriginals communities, and Waverley College which was visited last month by Tjilpi Wara and 'Uncle' Max.  The Indigenous liaison officer on the program is one of Tjilpi Wara's grandsons, Wadi Wiriyanjara; both are part of the Anangu-Ptjantjatjara-Yankunyatjatjara lands of Central Australia. Melanie Hogan says the Yarnup pilot takes Kanyini –- an Aboriginal word meaning interconnectedness and to support and care for – and creates a structure around it "to kick start a relationship between students and local indigenous communities". "The film provides a very accessible overview of the history of the continuing issue, the effects of white settlement on indigenous Australians," she says. "At the centre of the film, as it were, are the things Bob Randall explains are at the heart of the matter – the four main pillars of traditional indigenous society: its belief system, spirituality, the land and family. "Yarnup then examines how those pillars stand today, as they were before white settlement and after. "And through the documentary the students experience places, language, terms, dislocation and latter day re-discoveries and retrieval and to empathise with the difficulties these fellow Australians face. "The effect is to 'Talk the story, Walk the story'," Melanie says. Yarnup's future is expected to be reviewed after June and extended to another batch of interested schools. Funding so far has been from private sources. |
