Blogging A-Z - April Challenge - I is for .....

I is for...... .Inspiration & Imagination
I think that it is quite usual to be proud of the Country of your birth or of the Country where you reside, to be part of an institutions that has all the good values that we hold dear.
Australia is a Country that can be described as an inspiration and has been built by the imagination of the early immigrants and explorers. There are many other words that describe the country, but they don't start with I! I wrote somewhere recently that Australia was built on the backs of men and women who knew poverty and desperation in England. That desperation perhaps lead to a life of "penal servitude" and or transportation. The document I read described the need to fell trees for the timbers in order for timbers to be transported across the early colony to build the foundations of buildings and houses. So a country was formed on the backs of hard working individuals for whom life in an unknown entity was better than the life they had known previously.
Of course, it was not just convicts that built Australia, it was the visions, inspirations and imagination of those free settlers. Those who saved the meagre funds that had to buy the passage fair for themselves and their families. To make the conscious decision to leave loved one and travel months by sea to a Country that was new. To keep the memory alive of home they bought with them the traditions, oral history of their culture and shared it amongst their children who would have made the voyage and to share with the children born into this new land.
I am sure we have all done it, thought of the 5 most precious things or books we would take to a desert island. Think of what items you would take to a new country and way of life. Start with what do you carry it in. No suitcases or Gucci or Antler bags in the 18th and 19th Century. No photographs to remember the people left behind. No opportunity to suddenly realise the decision is wrong and return home.
The link for the A-Z Challenge 2011 post is HERE