Year 10 Geography Excursion

Our year 10 excursion to Port Fairy took place on Thursday the 28th of March and was a very successful trip. The intention of this trip was to gather data and learn about coastal erosion for our major Humanities assessment task. For this assessment task we had to understand how Port Fairy’s coastline has changed over time and what management strategies have been put in place to ensure a sustainable coastline into the future, which we believe we all learnt in some shape or form during our excursion. 

The morning of the excursion we met in the basement, splitting into two groups,10.2 and 10.3, and 10.4 and 10.1. Once arriving in Port Fairy each bus made its way to either Griffiths Island or East Beach to begin gathering field data. Our group started at Griffiths Island, walking along the Moyne River and out to the lighthouse, being lucky enough to catch Port Fairy on a nice sunny day. We all captured pictures of natural and manmade features of the environment around us, such as the training walls that boarded the river, piers, native and invasive vegetation and the lighthouse. 

Our group was lucky enough to see a baby seal flopping around in the water beneath the pier. We all took out our phones (which were required for this excursion) to capture a very cute video. We also came across a man who was an environmental scientist working on Griffiths Island, he was kind enough to discuss what he was doing and the management strategies that were being put in place. He explained how they were trying to rid of the invasive sea spurge that covered Australia’s Southern coast all the way from Portland to Albany. 

During our lunch break we walked around the main street of Port Fairy with the option to buy lunch and look through the shops. Afterwards the groups swapped over and we were now walking along East Beach discussing the effectiveness of its seawalls and the impacts that longshore drift has had on the coast surrounding Port Fairy.

Once both groups had finished our afternoon at either Griffiths Island or East Beach, we made our way back to school in the buses, ready to apply our new found knowledge to our assessment task.

Ms Finuala Neeson

Humanities