yarrabah

Coconut Tree Climbing – Samoan Style! climbing-feet Securely tie a piece of strong cloth and loop it around your ankles. When complete, flatten the strip against the coconut palm, with both feet on opposite sides of the tree trunk. Now, with the base of your feet grip the sides of the tree, the cloth will press against the tree as well. This helps keep your feet stable, and gives you more leverage to push yourself up the tree. Climbing can hurt if you’re not used to going barefoot, but your skin will toughen up with practice. Grip the tree between your hands. Your arms must be strong enough to hold your weight, so you are leaning into the tree instead of dangling away from it. Your hands need to be opposite of each other, so you can squeeze the trunk. Place your feet against the sides of the tree. Hop onto the base of the tree, gripping it with your legs. Turn your feet inward, so the undersides of your feet press against the left and right sides of the trunk. Your legs will be bent and splayed outward, like a frog’s. Push yourself up with your feet. Extend your legs without moving your feet or hands. This will bring you up straight, a little higher than before. Bring your feet up. Quickly bring both feet up at the same time, gripping a spot higher up the tree. To keep yourself stable, press hard with both hands. If your arms are strong, you can lift your feet completely off the trunk and position them again at a higher point. Otherwise, slide your feet up the side of the trunk, or push them up one at a time in small steps. This requires less muscle, but can be painful on soft feet. Keep your feet on opposite sides of the tree, so the loop doesn’t fall off your feet. Now you’re back in your starting position. Extend your legs to lift yourself higher and REPEAT. Once you’re up to the top, you can pick the coconut by twisting the stem of the coconut repeatedly until it breaks. But if you’re like my coconut tree cutter, chop of the coconuts with a machete. It’s so much easier and faster. Source: www.polynesia.com/blog/coconut-tree-climbing-samoan-style

The two most common harvesting methods are the climbing method and the pole method. Climbing is the most widespread, but it is also more dangerous and requires skilled workers.[79] Manually climbing trees is traditional in most countries and requires a specific posture that exerts pressure on the trunk with the feet. Climbers employed in coconut plantations often develop musculoskeletal disorders and risk severe injury or death from falling.[8 Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coconut

Education at the Mission The mission was declared an Industrial and Reformatory Schools Act in 1865 English was the only language of instruction and all links with the children's culture were deliberately broken Children slept and learned on concrete floors and often harsh discipline Education was only 2 hours a day but often came 2nd to work The education levels were low They didn't really aim for much to come out of the education except for the Aboriginals learning white ways Sometimes if there were brighter Aboriginals they would teach them more so that they could become teachers and end up teaching at the mission when they were older Education standards were purposely low so that more attention was on obedience, discipline, work, and routine Children would go to school to be taught how to fit in with the rest of society For adults, there was limited education- often just teaching them how to read and write so that they could become servants Source: yarrabahlife.weebly.com/yarrabah-mission.html

TRADITIONAL ABORIGINAL FOOD-GATHERING : TREE-CLIMBING People climbed trees for a number of reasons: To catch possums, lizards, snakes and other native animals. (These animals were also removed from trees by lighting a fire below and smoking them out, and by throwing stones at the animal, knocking it out of the tree.) To collect eggs and young birds from nests. To collect fruit and seeds from high branches. To reach native beehives for honey and wax. Beeswax was used as a seal on water containers, as a resin when making weapons, and as a fixative when making body decorations. (People didn’t always climb trees to obtain honey. Sometimes they chopped the whole tree down instead. Also, some species of native bee make hives at ground level.) To chop and strip long sheets of bark to be used for canoe-making and shelters. Throughout much of Australia, a small hatchet with a stone head was used to cut toe holds into trees to assist in climbing. In these photos, taken in the rainforests of northern Queensland, strong jungle vines (lawyer-vines or lawyer-cane) are used like ropes to assist climbing trees in search of both animals and native bee hives’ wax and honey. Source: www.aboriginalculture.com.au/tree-climbing/