Tour explores city’s history
Jack Cahill and Amber Haffner, Year 3, St Andrew’s Catholic College
LATE in Term 3, Year 3 students from St Andrew’s Catholic College took a bus to Cairns City and investigated how Cairns had changed and what had stayed the same over the past few decades.
All four classes of students walked around the city, looking at the sights and sounds of our bustling city centre.
Cairns Libraries staff opened the Cairns City Library early to allow students to look at the history of the library.
The library was previously the Cairns City Council chambers and the library staff took us for a tour and showed us the features of the building.
Many students applied to become library members and were presented their new library cards by Silvan.
Some students even got to scan out books.
The Cairns Art Gallery presented two exhibitions to us.
One was of baskets that were hand made for the exhibit.
The other was of amazing dot paintings by Daniel Boyd.
Daniel is the great grandson of a South Sea Island cane worker who worked on cane farms in Far North Queensland without a chance to return home.
The paintings were called Bitter Sweet.
We heard the story of Daniel’s great grandad and then drew the painting that meant the most to us.
After the art gallery, we walked to the wharf.
We saw the new public art installation called Citizen’s Gateway.
It was made by Brian Robinson – the same man who made the fish for the lagoon.
At the wharf, we saw the train tracks that were used to transport cargo that was moved by sea and the crane used to get the cargo off trains.
We enjoyed lunch under the fig tree near the wharf.
Finally, we went to the brand new museum at the School of the Arts building.
This was awesome and we got to do the sugar bag challenge.
The sugar bag challenge is where you try to lift a bag of sugar that is half of the weight of the bags that were loaded at the wharf.
We saw old phones, learnt about fun in the sun and saw a jaw of a shark with its four rows of teeth. It was amazing.
We must thank our teachers and we are also thankful for Cairns Libraries, Cairns Art Gallery and Cairns Museum for hosting us on a very busy day.