January 29, 2024
Spectacular New Year
Hello friends! We hope the New Year has started well for you. We know many of you are looking forward to celebrating all over again with the Lunar New Year, which falls on 10 February this year, because our schools team is busy taking a lot of bookings. This is a joyous time for the whole community as we anticipate moving from the Year of the Rabbit to the Year of the Dragon. The dragon is a propitious sign indicating improvement and abundance for everyone. May it be so!
Book With Us and Put Culture at the Heart of Education!
We have a huge announcement to kick off the year.
With any Cultural Infusion booking, you will now receive free access to a suite of constantly updated intercultural education resources, comprising internationally award-winning apps, games and activities that integrate the arts, music, geography, history and Indigenous perspectives that will put your students at the forefront in intercultural competency. There is no better way to prepare students for our globalised and ever-changing world.
6 Ways of Celebrating Lunar New Year in the Classroom
Check out our informative post with tips on how to celebrate Lunar New Year or go straight to our cultural educations page to book your celebrations now! We have a range of relevant programs, including Chinese Calligraphy & Brush Ink Painting, Chinese Classical Music, Chinese Culture for a Day, Chinese Kite Making, Chinese Lantern Making and Calligraphy, Chinese Lion Dance, Chinese Martial Arts, Filipino Music and Storytelling, Indonesian Infusion, Korean Classical Dance and Vietnamese Classical Dance.
Free Diversity Health Check
How well is your organisation managing the diversity of its stakeholders (customers, students, clients etc)? This Diversity, Equity & Inclusion healthcheck is for everyone and it is free. Share it with everyone you know!
Harmony Week 2024
Bookings are filling up fast for our Harmony Week programs. Our Education and Experiences team delivered more than 100 cultural incursions over Harmony Week 2023 for our phenomenal Harmony Week offerings, reaching more than 90 early learning centres, schools and community organisations across Australia.
We remember the history of this week. Harmony Week promotes respect, inclusivity and a sense of belonging for everyone and will be celebrated from the 20 to 26 March 2024, but harmony isn’t the full story of how this event came about. The United Nations International Day for the Elimination of Racial Discrimination commemorates the 21 March 1960 Sharpeville Massacre in South Africa where 69 people peacefully protesting apartheid laws were killed by South African police and more than 200 were wounded. This was a turning point in South Africa’s history, galvanising international sympathy for the anti-apartheid cause. In 1994, South Africa became the last country in Africa to gain liberation from colonisation and apartheid.
Do check out the phenomenal dancers and musicians who performed for Harmony Week at Dandenong Plaza last year.
Culture Corner
We asked our staff if they’d like to contribute a description of any cultural experience they had enjoyed over the summer break. Only two answered the call. This is what they came back with.
Quincy wrote he had waited 12 years for the chance and finally took it…
I went to MONA in Hobart. It was even better than I imagined it would be. The amazing blend of old and new art was astounding and inspiring. I stared into an Egyptian tablet from 2000 bc and then watched a musician compose a piece of music in front of me, that he then performed at 4pm on the same day he wrote it. Old and new indeed. At one stage I looked up at a big screen and someone had looped a series of Wonder Woman TV clips. I looked down and found myself next to a chair on which there was a white soup bowl with two live goldfish swimming about in it, along with a meat cleaver. I looked across the room at a mural by Sydney Nolan comprising more than 1500 small paintings. I then sat under a volcano – a soundscape by Jonsi from Sigur Ros that rattled my guts – then sat on a vibrating couch looking at a wall of vaginas. I spent five hours wandering about wishing I had 25 hours to spare. Art is more than just cultural expression. For me it’s liberation as well; liberation from structures, normalcy, routines, expectations and every other aspect of reality that we all diligently and responsibly live out. Art is not escapism like a dream or a holiday is, it’s liberation of the most beautiful, expressive, unique and weird aspects of our selves, and MONA is a brilliant celebration of this. Five stars!
Catherine wrote about reading Melissa Lucashenko’s 2023 novel Edenglassie: The narrative takes place in 2024 and 1855 and gave me a strong sense of the Brisbane/Meanjin area (which was for a short time known as Edendglassie), its early colonial history and how this history continues to play out. The story was partly inspired by the wrongful conviction of Kipper Billy in 1861, a conviction that was only formally overturned in 2018.
Calendar Spotlight: International Mother Language Day
International Mother Language Day falls on 21 February. This day was an initiative of Bangladesh, approved at the 1999 UNESCO General Conference and has been observed worldwide since 2000.
About 400 languages are spoken in Australia, of which about 167 are Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages, with 19% of the population aged over five speaking a language other than English at home.
Australia’s linguistic diversity is a precious resource that we could embrace much better. In fact, Australia has been called ‘a graveyard of languages’ by a linguistics professor at Macquarie Uni. More than 70% of us are monolingual, and we come lowest out of the OECD countries in terms of provision and uptake of languages. The benefits of multilingualism are well documented, and studies have shown that students in Australia who speak only English statistically perform the poorest in English at school.
How aware are you of the linguistic diversity in your own communities? Language, including mother language, is one of the 7 pillars underpinning our world-leading diversity data tool, Diversity Atlas. Language is one of the most important aspects of our cultural diversity that Diversity Atlas can reveal because of its vast language dataset, comprising every known (to our expert researchers) language and dialect in the world, numbering 11,200 in total.
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