 Springbank Island is a strangely significant site for something that is pretty much man-made island for the most part in the middle of Lake Burley-Griffin. Our course offers students all of the basic skills that they need to understand how to work in the field of archaeology. We're basically looking to find evidence from the pre-European occupation and then sort of some more Europeans with artefacts. We expect to find nice lithics, some indigenous artefact as well. This is a fantastic opportunity for students to have experience on an actual archaeological site. It's really good that there's such a close proximity to where we can actually work and where we study. It just makes it so much easier and it's a lot more enjoyable because you're with the people that you study as well. The moment we're drawing up a stratigraphy of the different layers and working out how old they be. This morning I set up a dumpy level which is when you look at the level of a site so you look at the depth of the area. I've just been sieving today so we can get rid of all that clay and sand and stuff like that and just find the smallest things. We excavated trenches yesterday, the first of a metre and a half of top soils. By bringing people out here and giving them the archaeology experience, it gives them that first step to hopefully continuing on as archaeologists in their own right. I'm quite confident that once I complete this programme that I'll be a much better archaeologist than I was when I first entered. I've always wanted to be an archaeologist ever since I was 10 years old. I think I'm set on archaeology now so it's just sort of now finding out where I want to specialise.