Old Melbourne Gaol

After the morning was spent working on our personal projects, we once again boarded a tram and made our way to an eerie part of Melbourne's past history. The Old Melbourne Gaol is a place that has a feeling like no other place. It feels like living history is right there for you to touch. A most freaky place that's for sure.

OUR PERSONAL PROJECTS.

Today our task in the morning was to research our own project. We have to make up our own and we are not limited in any way as to what we choose. As you can imagine there are so many things going on in Melbourne city that it's easy to find something to choose but hard to decide which exciting area to focus our projects on. Some of the topics being looked at are,

• Graffiti as art.
• Fashion.
• Sport in the city.
• Living in the city.

There are many more project topics being delved into while we are in the city, these are just some of them!

Our Classroom at the HUB in Docklands.

This is a facility provided by Melbourne City Council for educational purposes. It is a great area to come to and it gives us a base to work from when we come to the city.

Trip to the Aquarium and Scavenger hunt through the City

Today saw us making our own way into the city to meet at the city class room by 8.55 am. Most of us made it around about then, proving that you need to make some time allowances for public transport.



Our first task was a scavenger hunt through the buisness district of Melbourne town following a trail that led eventually to the corner of Bourke and Swanston St. Many of us missed some of the sites along the trail so we got to see more of Melbourne than we bargained for.


Once we made it to Bourke and Swanston we had some time to get lunch and listen to the street performers.



After a quick stroll among the city's sidewalk traffic

we hopped on a tram at Flinders St station


and then rode down to the Aquarium.
At the AQUARIUM
The aquarium was awesome with soooo many fish(!) We saw the lot and our guides Lai and Johno were very informative and seemed to know the answer to everything.
The best part by far was the feeding of the rays and the sharks in the big tank at the bottom of the aquarium.

What a day!

Monday 3rd March begins.....THE CITY WEEKS

For the next two weeks we have to catch the train in to the city every day and complete a bunch of tasks like orienteering our way around the streets of Melbourne, visiting the Aqarium, checking out the MCG, and being 'locked up' at old Melbourne goal.

The first day we spent finding our way into the city and familiarising ourselves with the city class room at docklands,




then we went around the city on the quaint City Circle Tram just to get our bearings and have a look at our beautiful city.

29th Feb........Time off for good behaviour.

The school swimming sports were held at the Caulfield pool and there was much swimming and competing going on. It was great to get out of the class room for the day and the sun made a welcome appearance around lunchtime!

My View

Hi, I'm a year 9 student at Mordialloc College. I'm currently in the MEXP program.
So far it's been really fun and interesting. We've just completed our "Local Experience" project. So far we have done some pretty sweet stuff like, exploring Mordialloc street, Beach and Creek, we visited Holmesglen TAFE and adventured around the campus. Soon we will spend two weeks in the City and help out at our community work placements that were selected for us.

What it loks like from where I sit!

a couple of friends of mine.

Mordialloc Creek


Samples being taken

A rubbish trap doing it's job

Into the lab
Last week we spent some time down at the Mordialloc Creek, a famous local waterway with a long history of human use. We collected some water samples from the creek bank and we have kept them in a safe place until today. We have managed to book some time in the senior school labroratory where, with the help of a dedicated lab manager, we were able to mount our spamples and view them under microscopes. The results were amazing! "There was way more stuff in there than I imagined and the little micro things were really energetic." The types of "micro-things" we discovered were paramecium and they were in everyone's samples no matter where the sample was taken. Also the dirtier and smellier the sample the more paramecium there were. This leads us to believe that the presence of paramecium means contaminated water.



Working hard

VIDEO OF MORDI CREEK WATER X 400

This video was captured using our new state of the art microscope software and clearly shows the paramecium swimming around in the sample of creek water.

In the line of Duty
We went down to the creek to collect some water samples but silly me went in the creek. I stood on a large log and grabbed hold of a stick that was sticking out of the mud. I collected my sample and headed back to ground but it was not over. I put my foot down hoping it was safe but when I stood up it sunk ankle deep in the mud. Yuk, my socks were wet and muddy and my shoes were smelling like dead fish. That was my big adventure to the creek- turns out it was a swimming success.

At the Beach

We all wandered down to the beach at Aspendale. There were some graders doing some work building an environment wall to stop the king tides from taking all the sand from the beach. We interviewed one of the operators and he told us that it was to protect the grassed sand dunes from being degraded. The big bags of sand were stacked up 7 high. This system was better than building a rock wall he told us because the rock walls eventually become infested with rats. The operators worked for an environmental engineering company and they expected to be working here for another 6 weeks. What a job!!!





The very helpful and friendly Dominic on the job.
Beachbags full of sand.

Bigger Digger placing the bags.

You can see the wall fore of the grassy area.
Meanwhile, further up the beach.
There was evidence of human impact all over the place from rubbish being washed up, retaining walls built at the creek mouth, playgrounds on the foreshore, the peir and a beach promenade at the back of the sand. From these photos its easy to see how much we love to be at the beach, now if we can just clean up as we leave.............
Rubbish.


A team in action.

Creek mouth Northside


Creek mouth, Southside



A high impact zone.

This is a mural painted on a wall by the creek depicting a scene at the beach from 1934. This shows the long history of human influence on this area.

Another high imact zone.

These girls were very involved with the work they were doing in the field.

An interesting discovery was to find a film crew filming Catronia Rowntree. Possibly for one of those lifestyle shows that are so popular.
Down by the Creek........................


This morning we visited the creek to collect soil and water samples to take back to the science lab to test. We chose 2 sites, one just above the boat ramp and another 200 metres further upstream. Our plan is to analyse the samples to compare turbidity (cloudiness) and to look under microscope power to see if there are any micro-organisms present.

These are samples from 2 sites that we plan to test next week.

Also we noted as many of the examples of flora and fauna that we could gather with plans to try and identify them from resources back at school.


We'll keep you posted8-)