Barrygoanna.files.wordpress.com



Getting of WisdomSunday 12 Feb 2017 to Sat 18 Feb, Australia & New Zealand‘A Taste’ of the International Exchange and Conference Program for International participants Inviting policy makers, practitioners and researchers interested in learning in later life from ELOA (Education and Learning of Older Adults Network) of ESREA (in Europe), Australia and New Zealand.Hosted by Adult Learning Australia, Federation University Australia, & ACE Aotearoa.With generous support and collaboration from many people, organisations, local communities and sponsors across Australia and New Zealand.Notes by Barry Golding, accurate as of 31 August 2016The purpose of these notesThese notes are to help inform potential and registered international participants for the full Exchange program. It helps you to get an idea of what to expect if you register and take all the recommended flight connections: from arrival in Melbourne, Australia (if from Europe, via Dubai at 6.30am Sunday morning 12 Feb-, to departure out of Wellington for Melbourne at 5pm Sat 18 Feb. All of what follows are confirmed plans covered by the full Exchange registration cost (except for the flights). You may register just for the Australian or New Zealand programs, or just one of the three Conferences. Note that some fine details may change slightly closer to the event.Why is our Exchange program deliberately different?We figure that you may have been to too many big and expensive conferences where all you see and hear are the same people for many days, with similarly presented expensive meals in the same huge and impersonal hotels. Such conferences can give you a very narrow perspective and you come away wondering why you attended. This conference is deliberately different. While it is na?ve to believe that you will soak up the wisdom of two different and ancient peoples, lands and modern nations in just one week, our aim is to give you new, diverse and challenging perspectives on later life learning policy, research and practice truly ‘down under’ in the world. While full Exchange participants get to see and experience ‘the lot’, the places, participants, landscapes, themes and presenters change each day. We will use local and public transport, relatively inexpensive local venues, catering and accommodation wherever feasible to keep the registration cost as reasonable and accessible as possible. Most of our presenters and organisers are community members giving freely of their time and expertise. Wherever possible we make critically important Indigenous connections. We will try and neatly weave in nature, culture and community and provide many unique opportunities to talk, eat, travel and walk in the landscape, and for those that want to fully enjoy the summer, also swim.The Australian part of the ExchangeFor European participants, the final leg of the flight connection onward from Dubai takes you over thousands of kilometers of ‘outback’, mainly desert Australia in mid-summer as the sun rises. It will be warm to hot for much of your stay in Australia, but it is usually and thankfully a dry heat. Ballarat being at a higher altitude is typically a few degrees cooler than Melbourne. European participants on the recommended arrival flight will be met on exit from customs and driven to Ballarat as soon as is feasible to the Federation University Australia Camp Street accommodation in central Ballarat, via a registration desk outside Building S. Registrants on flight connections from New Zealand and elsewhere in Australia are advised to pre-book and take the Ballarat Airport Shuttle directly to the Ballarat Railway Station. Camp Street is then only five minutes walk away. If you coming vie central Melbourne, the trains run approximately hourly. The rooms you will stay in Ballarat are very comfortable and modern and have shared common areas. Most have private ensuite bathrooms but there is no air conditioning.Ballarat, with 100,000 people is the largest inland city in Australia besides the national capital, Canberra. It is the site of a major ‘gold rush’ from the 1850s and preserves much of the ‘Victorian’ colonial era architecture in its central streetscape. Once you are rested, a bus will pick you up at 1.30pm and take you for an Aboriginal ‘Welcome to Country’ and of sit down lunch of Australian bush produce from Saltbush Kitchen at MADE: The Museum of Australian Democracy, Eureka. ‘Eureka Stockade’ was the site of a nationally significant rebellion and brief, deadly battle between gold miners and the British Colonial forces on 3 December 1854. While the miners lost the battle it led eventually to the development of Australian parliamentary democracy. Australia is not yet a republic, Indigenous Australians are missing from the national constitution and unlike in New Zealand there was no early treaty. We still have a lot to learn.We plan after lunch to take you by bus for a walk (or optional swim) at picturesque St Georges Lake, Creswick, a former mining reservoir, then drive across the volcanic plains through the forest to Daylesford Botanical Gardens on Wombat Hill and also to taste the waters at local Hepburn Springs Spa (modeled on the European invention). By now were are in Djajawurring country, one of over 300 distinct and different Indigenous nations that comprised Australia at the time of mainly European ‘discovery’ and invasion. A 20 minute drive will take us for dinner from the wood fired oven at the rural Captains Creek organic winery, before a 40 minute drive back (past my place in tiny rural Kingston) to Ballarat where most people will gladly try and sleep off the jet lag.Our first very full day is designed to immerse you in the diverse places and practices of Australian adult and community education, and in the process show you some very beautiful places on the iconic and beautiful Great Ocean Road. A bus will leave from Camp St at 8am for breakfast welcomed and informed by the ‘shedders’ at the Buninyong Men’s Shed. After breakfast we drive for an hour through a sparsely populated, very dry plain, through a sea of wind turbines to rural Winchelsea, where the Winchelsea Community House and the wider local community will give us a morning ‘cuppa’ (tea or coffee) and show us what they do best in the ‘later learning’ space, very broadly defined. Another hour in the bus takes us south over the forested Otway Ranges to the lazy beach resort at Lorne and west along the amazing coast for a welcome lunch at the Wye River General Store. Much of the tiny Wye River township (112 homes were destroyed, but no lives lost) was devastated only a year ago by the Christmas Day 2015 fires, but the Australian vegetation is ‘custom designed’ to recover, and it is all slowly coming back. You will have the option of crossing the road to the beach for a walk or swim before we drive on along the magnificent coastal road, stopping briefly for the breathtaking view at Cape Patton, and on through Apollo Bay to ‘Maits Rest’, for a truly beautiful walk through a cool, ancient rainforest of Mytle Beech (Lophozonia cunninghamii), tree ferns bordered by Mountain Ash (Eucalyptus regnans), the world’s second tallest flowering tree.At 4pm we arrive back at the Apollo Bay Surf Club where the Marrar Woorn Neighborhood House has organized a comprehensive community immersion in learning in later life in a rural Australian coastal community. An opportunity for anther quick walk or swim at the nearby beach is possible before we drive back through the Otways and gathering sunset to Ballarat by 9pm.Tuesday is Conference Day 1 in central Ballarat with a chance for a sleep in and slow breakfast before assembling in the Fed Uni theatre only a minute from your accommodation with an equal number of new participants. The theme today is Older Learning in Diverse Contexts, that will include, amongst many other themes, introductory keynotes by Alex Withnall from the UK, the CEO of the Australian Men’s Sheds Association, David Helmers and ‘Eldership from an Aboriginal Perspective’ by Tony Dreise of the Guumilroi Aboriginal Nation - straddling the NSW-Queensland border. Our advance plans are for an evening Civic Reception hosted by the City of Ballarat, conditional on local Council elections in Nov 2016, and an early night.On Wednesday the focus (and we all) move to Melbourne. We will be on the 7.46am train from Ballarat to the large and ‘world’s most livable’ city of 4 million people, Melbourne, getting the last part by tram to the historic ‘Royal Society of Victoria’ venue for Conference Day 2 by 9.30am. Today the theme is Learning in Later Life and Social Inequalities joined by many ‘new’ participants and a diverse and interesting program. We need to finish up by 3pm to ensure those full Exchange participants catch their 6.20pm flight out of Melbourne into the evening sunset out over the Tasman Sea to ACE Aotearoa where an equally warm welcome awaits in Wellington, the southernmost national capital in the world. Here you are half a day away and truly ‘down under’ - from a Eurocentric perspective.The New Zealand part of the ExchangeAfter a 3.5 hour flight (and a two hours New Zealand time difference) we arrive around midnight, being greeted and whisked into downtown Cuba Street to a welcome and very comfortable bed at the QC Hotel, your accommodation for the next three nights. The Thursday (Conference 3) theme in Wellington, again joined by many local registrants, is Learning, Empowerment and Identity in Later life. The venue is a local Maori (iwi owned and controlled) one, Te Wharewaka o Poneke on the Wellington waterfront only 10 minutes walk from our hotel. ACE Aotearoa is an inspirational bicultural (Maori and Pakeha) ‘white non-Maori’) organization also with Pasifika influences. You will see and experience the power and beauty of a Maori Powhiri (welcome) in language, and hear about how learning in later life manifests itself in New Zealand, including via keynote presentations from Pakeha and Maori presenters in a program. Brian Findsen has played an important part in shaping the program with the New Zealand committee. The modern day Indigenous Maori presence in New Zealand is qualitatively different and deeper to what you will have experienced in Ballarat and Melbourne in Australia, though there are places in central and northern Australia where this can be different.On Friday we again seek to immerse you in the diversity of New Zealand adult education - in practice and in place. This time our program has been generously shaped by Peter McNeur. We travel from Wellington by country train through the Rimutaka Tunnel to the smallish city of Masterton (22,000 people) in the fertile and agriculturally productive rural Wairapapa region.On the final morning for those involved in the New Zealand Exchange there are plans to take you to the excellent close by Te Papa Museum on the picturesque Wellington waterfront, and also up the Wellington Botanical Gardens on the Cable Car for amazing views over the city. Those returning straight back to Australia (and some then on to Europe to connect to the long recommended evening flight back to Dubai and on to Europe) will fly back to Melbourne at 5pm on Saturday.RegistrationIf you plan to participate and are not already registered, please do so as soon as possible as places are limited. We strongly advise booking the recommended international connecting flights at the same time: details of these flights are available on the Conference registration page at Professor Barry Golding b.golding@federation.edu.au as Exchange Facilitator ................
................

In order to avoid copyright disputes, this page is only a partial summary.

Google Online Preview   Download