Back home, my mum and I like to paint rocks to hide around town and bring joy to people that find them, so I decided to take this idea with me to New Zealand. I really wanted to give it away in New Zealand because that’s the place I’d wanted to visit for so much of my life, and it holds a large piece of my heart. I painted a rock modeled after the house in Up, with the balloons, that says on the back “adventure is out there!” New Zealand was the adventure I always wanted to have, so I wanted to give my gift to someone else still looking for their adventure.

While in Wellington, someone from our group met these cool people working at a clothing store, and then it began this whole connection with our group and them and their friends getting drinks and dinner. One of the people I met was Kalani. He was a super cool guy originally from Fiji who had been living in Wellington for the last few years. Funnily enough, his dream travel destination is Atlanta, which is my hometown. After chatting with him and his friends for several hours, I decided to give him my gift in the hope that he’d one day have his adventure in Atlanta. (more…)

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Australia was an amazing place to visit, and I’m so thankful for the opportunity. Even after seeing a lot of Australian films, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect when I arrived. There were some things that weren’t quite as they seemed in a lot of the movies, but others that fit pretty well.

First, the way people talked was a bit different than it is portrayed in some of the movies. Maybe it’s because we stayed in major cities, but people sounded a lot more proper than some of our favorite outback heroes like Crocodile Dundee. There were a lot fewer exclamations of “crikey” or “g’day mate” than one might think from the movies.

Maybe it’s silly, but I also felt like there would have been a lot more massive bugs or venomous snakes than we saw. Considering I did not see any, maybe I can’t really speak to this. Maybe it’s because we stayed in major cities and were nowhere even close to the outback, but I almost expected dangerous things to be everywhere and all the citizens to have big knives like Crocodile Dundee. (Shocking news. Australians aren’t actually all like their most famous ambassador Crocodile Dundee.) Still, most of the films placed the audience in small town Australia or closer to or in the outback. It felt that the harsh land was one of the key aspects of Australian life, but in the cities, I couldn’t feel that at all. It felt a lot more like home than I expected, and nothing felt at all dangerous or intimidating other then perhaps the hot sun.

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Melbourne was definitely one of my favorite cities we visited on this trip, and I wish we could’ve spent more time here. While on our tour, we learned some pretty interesting things about the city, though much of our tour was history related rather than film. We did see the shooting location for one film though! On the Beah, with Gregory Peck, was shot in Melbourne. Onto some history facts…

First of all, arcades are basically indoor shopping malls, not places for pinball machines and other games. There are countless arcades in the city of Melbourne, and in the old days, the wealthy people in the city would get all dressed up and parade around the arcades to show off. They called it “doing the block,” and in one of the arcades, there is a great old photo hanging that shows this.

We also learned about the significance of the Eureka Tower, the tallest building in the city. It is named after the Eureka Rebellion in 1854, in which gold miners revolted against the United Kingdom’s colonial authority. Many lives were lost in this revolt. At the top of the building, you see a large gold square. This is made of real gold symbolic of the gold miners that were involved. The red line that can be seen looks vaguely like a teardrop coming from the gold is symbolic of the many lives that were lost at this time.

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I was looking forward to visiting the Australian Center for the Moving Image from the beginning of the trip, and it thoroughly lived up to expectations. The exhibit was divided into three sections: one on the history of film, one on voices, and one on sensations. While I enjoyed all of them, Voices and Sensations were the two that stood out the most to me.

Voices was immediately interesting as it contained real movie props and costumes, many of which aren’t even from Australian films. They have the piano from The Piano, Barbossa’s sword from Pirates of the Caribbean: Curse of the Black Pearl, and they even have Cate Blanchett’s Oscar award statue. But beyond these cool things, they spent time in the exhibit discussing the many voices that go into a movie. Each role involved in making a film (writers, directors, special effects technicians, animators, etc.) has an effect on the final product. This is one of the reasons Aboriginal filmmakers feel so strongly about what they’re doing. In my favorite part of the exhibit, I sat down and watched short documentaries about five Aboriginal filmmakers who explain why they love filmmaking and doing what they do. Filmmaking gives them a sense of cultural identity and a way to powerfully and visually convey that to others. And by making their own films, they can finally take charge of their portrayal and story in a way that history stole from them in previous years. Film gives them a voice. This is why many Aboriginal filmmakers like to create documentaries. They can give truthful stories of events in the lives of Aboriginals with no influence from the white perspective. But some Aboriginal filmmakers, like Warwick Thornton, prefer to work in fiction, telling Aboriginal stories through another lens. Thornton’s 2009 film Samson and Delilah was particularly successful, landing him an award at the Cannes Film Festival.

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On today’s episode of HGTV, we found our new home at Brighton Beach!

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Learning about and experiencing indigenous culture from Australia and New Zealand has been a wonderful experience. Both the Maori people of New Zealand and the Tjapukai tribe of Aboriginal Australians were incredibly welcoming and kind in sharing their cultures with us. This process of getting to know other cultures is so important to being a good global citizen. No two cultures are exactly alike, and it’s important to learn about each one.  Although I still have a lot to learn, I’ve been able to make strides in understanding both cultures and some of the similarities and differences between them.

The first thing I learned is that Maori culture is relatively the same across New Zealand. Maori from around New Zealand speak the same language and culture with only minor differences in dialect. This is very different from Aboriginal culture, in which the Tjapukai tribe probably has a completely different language from another tribe. But across all tribes in both culture, song and dance are incredibly important.

The Maori also migrated to New Zealand, and they have many traditions, song, and dance that tell the story of how they came to the country. The Aboriginals have always been in Australia, and they are the world’s oldest living culture.

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I’m so thankful that I got to see the beautiful Great Barrier Reef once in my lifetime. But I think once is enough. Although the reef was lovely and it was super cool to find Nemo and see the other sea life in their natural habitat, I’ve never been more seasick in my life. In fact, it is the only time I’ve been seasick in my life, and it is certainly enough for me. Despite getting violently ill, I still managed to see a lot of cool things and learn a lot about the reef. Some of the highlights were finding Nemo (the clownfish), spotting a sea turtle (duuuude), seeing a tiny shark (doo dooo doo dooo doo), and touching a sea cucumber (surprisingly squishy). But beyond that, here are three of the things I learned about the reef…

1. The Great Barrier Reef is roughly the size of Italy. It’s HUGE, the largest reef system in the world. It’s so big that it can even be seen all the way from outer space. Maybe it’s silly, but I also didn’t fully realize that we would be in the middle of nowhere in the ocean when we toured the reef until we got there. There was no land in sight. The only things you could see were ocean and the few boats you came over on.

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Spending some koala-ty time with my new friend Rocho.

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Five very professional surfers pose for photos on Manly Beach.

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Anyone who knows me knows that I love a good film festival, and Flickerfest was no exception. In fact, Flickerfest was amazing. Where other than Bondi Beach can you spend an afternoon relaxing on a beach and then wander into a film festival? And not just a regular film festival, but one that gives you a lovely outdoor amphitheater with beanbags and blankets? Apart from the ambiance, I also really enjoyed the films. While some I really liked and others I wasn’t so fond of, I loved the chance to get to see some beautiful Australian films.

My favorite of the short films was actually one of the very first ones we say. Titled “An Act of Love,” by writer/director Lucy Knox, this short follows the story of identical twins. These twin girls do everything together. They wear the same clothes, do their hair the same, and always hang out together. But one of the twins gets tired of having a completely shared identity and wants to be her own individual, resulting in a dramatic scene where her twin pushes her over in the middle of a roller skating rink. In anger and frustration, she then decides to go home and cut off her braids to change her identity, and after comforting her, her sister does the same. This film was one of the more simple ones we watched. It was only about ten minutes long, and it felt very relatable to me having a sibling very close in age. It was stylistically shot in a way that benefited the story rather than distracted from it. And my favorite thing is that there was less dialogue than you might expect. The film showed you what was happening rather than telling you, and I loved that.

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