Nature that supports our future（フォト＆エッセイコンクール入賞作品）

フォト＆エッセイコンクール入賞作品紹介

修学旅行でオーストラリアを訪れた中学生・高校生を対象に、昨年４月から１２月にかけて実施された「第1回オーストラリア教育旅行フォト&エッセイコンクール」。今回は、雄大な自然と野生動物が富むオーストラリアでの感動体験を綴った、英語の作品をご紹介します。

＜優秀賞＞「Nature that supports our future」
応募者：松下由依さん（京都府・京都橘高等学校２年）

-Through the experience of staying in Australia-

I went to Australia to stay for a year in 2009 and have known and learnt a lot of things through this valuable experience. We can "know" things of other countries in Japan, but we can't "learn" about them well directly. I would like to tell one thing that was especially impressive for me. It is about "nature".

Nature is one of the things I like the best in Australia. I could perceive and experience it because my host family took me to a lot of places. They are not only well-known places but also unwell-know places. But I found the workings of nature everywhere. Experiencing Australian beautiful nature was my hope before I started staying in Australia. I experienced Australian nature in various places, but I got the impression most in the trip to Great Ocean Road. So I would like to talk about it first.

Great Ocean Road is famous as the most beautiful coastline in Australia. There are a lot of strangely shaped, beautiful and mystic rocks I heard that they all occurred by the power of nature and no humans added their hands. What I saw besides weird shaped rocks was a lot of animals. There were various animals native to Australian such as a kangaroo, wallaby, kookaburra, echidna etc.

At this opportunity, I thought about Australian nature. I haven't seen so many kinds of animals in Japan. Japan used to have a rich nature, but we lost most of it because of the advances in technology. However, is Japan the only country that has developed? Australia has developed, too. So how are they keeping their rich nature? I think that is because they are exerting themselves to protect it. Australia's quarantine is very strict to protect their peculiar ecosystem. I think Japan's effort to save nature was not enough. But I'm sure we can still make an effort to save nature. We can't lose anything any more.

I have one thing that I would like to tell everybody. Please think about that we are allowed to live by nature. Everything we eat comes from nature. So it is time to show our gratitude to it. We also have to do it for the future of Earth. Australia is really important country for me because it taught me this important issue of the day that we have to start considering as soon as possible.