Enjoying God's Goodness: Aboriginal Cultural Center

This is the beautiful Aboriginal Cultural Center in CAIRNS . What a helpful, educational, enlightening place...with nice staff as well. Glad this experience was included in our tour.

The first large, light airy room have several different striking pieces of Aboriginal artwork. Some were quite large. Each had a story.

We had a good opportunity to look around before we were ushered into another very large round auditorium. We sat in two similar circles, each under a very large screen....two huge rectangles high above us. We were not able to take pictures in this room and it is hard to describe. Wish I could show you.

Basically it was a theatre and they showed a colorful multifaceted high tech story about creation, using several mediums. Two aboriginal men in native costumes told the story. One represented water and one represented land.

Very interesting tho I could not always catch the details of the story.

From there we went outside to a very nice outdoor stage. Here we enjoyed native music and dance.

This man is playing a hand made Didgeridoo. Interesting sounds come out as he manipulates his lips and tongue. You see men playing these in the streets of the little towns, hoping for money in the basket.

There was music and narration during the traditional tribal dances - once again they are based on telling stories.

From the amphitheater we went across a bridge and into the woods. There a young man showed us hand made clubs and spears. He showed us how to hold them and use them. Each one had a special use.

He shared that men who broke their laws were punished by beatings and death. The women could also be beaten under certain circumstances.

Then he spoke about various things from the woods they used for physical problems, digestive disorders, rashes, etc. He had an extensive collection of leaves, nuts, seeds, etc that they used.

At the end he showed us how to throw a boomerang!

The next event was going into a clearing where we all had a chance to actually throw a spear and a boomerang.

I was NOT successful at all with the boomerang but I did pretty well with one spear.

I was shooting right into the sun on these pics so they aren't real good. Andy had pretty good form and got the boomerang to spin and the spear to fly!