The following slightly edited information was received from Georgina, who describes herself:

I am 18 and in my first year at University. I live with my mum and a cat named Lizzie. I am studying for a Bachelor of Arts at the University of Tasmania. My subjects are English, Sociology, History and Cultural Practices (Next semester no more Cultural Practices I am doing sculpture).

The assignment I was doing when I found this plan was about Tasmanian culture (for cultural practices). Judging by the content of information about Australia and Tasmania on the net, the way Aussies speak seems to cause great interest and difficulty among those overseas.

I live in Launceston, up the top of Tasmania. It is Australia's third oldest city and was named after a city in England (Sydney is the oldest, Hobart, Tasmania’s capital, the 2nd). It has a population of about 70 000. Over 40% of Tasmania is National park, world heritage area or otherwise protected. About 2.4% of Australia's population lives in Tasmania. It often gets missed in information and maps. There are no full blooded Tasmanian Aboriginals anymore they were all killed by Europeans or died of European diseases.

However there are about 4500 people who identify as Aboriginal because they are of Aboriginal decent. The Tasmanian Aboriginals developed separately from mainlanders for about 13,000 years after water levels rose and Tasmania was cut off from Australia.  All my direct relatives from my Great great great grandparents down have lived in Tasmania. I am currently researching my family history, as a result I know a fair bit about Tasmanian history.
 

I chanced upon your unit plan as a result of studying for an assignment for school. I am a student and an Australian and I thought that you might be interested to hear my perspective of your Australian unit plan as citizen of the country. I was impressed to discover that you conduct a unit on Australia at your school and I think that the idea of pen pals is great. I wish I got to do that in school!!

I have included a few bits and bobs that you might like to take a gander at:

The last sentence of your introduction is not very good Australian slang. Peek-a-boo is baby talk, and is generally used when playing a hide and seek game with babies. You could instead say take a peek at, have a geezer at, have a sticky (or sticky beak) at, take a look see or take a gander at (as above).

A bobby dazzler doesn't refer to a person but rather an item, e.g. "that's a bobby dazzler of a [insert item name here, e.g. outfit, bag, thing, etc.]"

In Australia we generally call cookies biscuits, Anzac biscuits are referred to as such.

There is no such thing as outback punch as far as i know. Traditional outback drinks include beer and billy tea (tea cooked over an outdoor fire in a 'billy' a kind of pot). Punch is more of a suburban or rural thing than an outback one as are Anzac biscuits. Punch usually includes lemonade, ginger beer and various types of fruit juice?

In the geography section you have missed out the territory that contains Canberra (the capital) the Australian Capital Territory, and my state Tasmania, (the islands at the bottom of the continent.)

Thank you, Georgina, for adding to our understanding of the Land Down Under.

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