Nilpena Excursion
At the end of the day on Tuesday the principal said to me in passing, “Tomorrow you’ll join us on the school excursion.” Sounded promising, but I had no idea where we were going or what we would see.
Next morning it was raining, not enough to dampen spirits or cancel the outing (for good reason – it wasn’t raining wherever it was we were going.) There was even a bit of excitement in the air as teachers and support staff arrived in the staff room. I was to drive the school car with a colleague and two of the senior students seated in the back. After an hour and a half we stopped at a newly constructed gate, complete with security codes, on a flat salt-bushed plain: an ex sheep station by appearances, but now the main entrance to the newly created Nilpena Ediacara National Park. I remember thinking windswept saltbush with the occasional hillock and tree hardly lends itself to a national park of international renown, as I remembered reading somewhere that the park is under UNESCO consideration for World Heritage status.
There were some eagles and colourful finches but, as I was soon to discover, it contains something even more fascinating: Fossils!
We pulled up at the old woolshed and were met by Mary and her team of staff and students from a California university. What we were soon to witness blew my mind: The best evidence of how life on this planet first evolved, found anywhere in the world.
In cooperation with National Parks they have constructed a huge fossilised jigsaw puzzle of bedrock lit by overhead coloured lights. The children stand around its outer edge in the dark and listen to the accompanying narrative of how IT ALL BEGAN. Little wormlike animals, tentacles, and shivering beetle-like shapes emerge from the gloom. The voices and imagery take us on a journey of how it all started: Living things, squirming things, wriggling things, and reproducing things.
It was not just a lesson in the Earth’s evolution, but there were cultural matters, and spiritual matters, that needed to be explained and settled. There were my colleague’s mum and brother, elders and local Adnamatna custodians, who were available to tell us how life: its beginning and continuance, was interpreted and understood in the laws of country and the laws of the Adnamatna way.
For a brief moment, the children tapped into a spell-binding window into life, five hundred million years ago. How’s that for an unexpected excursion.