Not a parent thing, but it was funny. We've been watching a documentary about the history of European settlement in Australia. The second episode dealt with Tasmania. Apparently, the whalers and sealers who came to the coast of Tassie were a particularly noxious bunch and kidnapped Aboriginal women for nefarious purposes. Anyway, I'd stopped the DVD just to check that everyone was clear what a whaler and a sealer was as it was fairly key. i.e. Trugannini, the apparently last full blood Tasmanian Aborigine saw her husband to be tossed overboard by these men and then witnessed his hands being cut off so that he would be unable to climb back into the boat. The fact that she negotiated with the British is attributed to seeing not only her fiancee, but also various other members of her family die violently. Anyway, that's preamble...we watched the DVD and the next class, I was checking how much had been retained, so I asked "what was the job of a sealer?" expecting the answer of "to catch seals". The answer that I got was "to take the women." Not sure whether to
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09-12-2010, 07:00 AM
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