The Dinka people are a Nilotic ethnic group native to South Sudan, but having a sizable diaspora population. They live along the Nile, from Mangalla to Renk, in regions of Bahr el Ghazal, Upper Nile and Abyei Area of the Ngok Dinka in South Sudan; the Dinka live on traditional agriculture and pastoralism, relying on cattle husbandry as a cultural pride, not for commercial profit or for meat, but cultural demonstrations, marriages' dowries and milk feedings for all ages. The Dinka cultivate food crops and cash crops; the food crops are grains sorghum and millet. The cash crops include groundnuts and gum-arabic. Cattle are confined to riversides, the Sudd and grass areas during the dry season, but are taken to high grounds in order to avoid floods and water during the rainy season, they number around 4.5 million people according to the 2008 Sudan census, constituting about 18% of the population of the entire country, the largest ethnic tribe in South Sudan. Dinka, or as they refer to themselves and jieng, make up one of the branches of the River Lake Nilotes.

Dinka are sometimes noted for their height. With the Tutsi of Rwanda, they are believed to be the tallest people in Africa. Roberts and Bainbridge reported the average height of 182.6 cm in a sample of 52 Dinka Agaar and 181.3 cm in 227 Dinka Ruweng measured in 1953–1954. However, it seems the stature of today's Dinka males is lower as a consequence of undernutrition and conflicts. An anthropometric survey of Dinka men, war refugees in Ethiopia, published in 1995 found a mean height of 176.4 cm. Other studies of comparative historical height data and nutrition place the Dinka as the tallest people in the world; the Dinka people have no centralised political authority, instead comprising many independent but interlinked clans. Some of those clans traditionally provide ritual chiefs, known as the "masters of the fishing spear" or beny bith, who provide leadership for the entire people and appear to be at least in part hereditary, their language, called Dinka or "Thuɔŋjäŋ", is one of the Nilotic languages of the eastern Sudanic language family.

The name means "people" in the Dinka language. It is written using the Latin alphabet with a few additions. According to oral traditions the Dinka originated from the Gezira in. In medieval times this region was dominated by the kingdom of Alodia, a Christian, multi-ethnic empire dominated by Nubians. Living in its southern periphery and interacting with the Nubians, the Dinka absorbed a sizable amount of the Nubian vocabulary. From the 13th century, with the disintegration of Alodia, the Dinka began to migrate out of the Gezira, fleeing slave raids and other military conflicts as well as droughts; the Dinka's religions and lifestyle have led to conflict with the Arab Muslim government in Khartoum. The Sudan People's Liberation Army, led by late Dr. John Garang De Mabior, a Dinka, took arms against the government in 1983. During the subsequent 21-year civil war, many thousands of Dinka, along with fellow non-Dinka southerners, were massacred by government forces; the Dinka, led by Salva Kiir Mayardit, have engaged in a separate civil war with the Nuer and other groups who accuse them of monopolising power.

On November 15, 1991 the event known as the "Dinkas Massacre" commenced in South Sudan. Forces led by the breakaway faction of Riek Machar deliberately killed an estimated 2,000 civilians in Dinkas of Hol, Twic and others in villages and wounded several thousand more over the course of two months, it is estimated. Southern Sudan has been described as "a large basin sloping northward", through which flow the Bahr el Jebel River, the Bahr el Ghazal River and its tributaries, the Sobat, all merging into a vast barrier swamp. Vast Sudanese oil areas to the south and east are part of the flood plain, a basin in the southern Sudan into which the rivers of Congo, Uganda and Ethiopia drain off from an ironstone plateau that belts the regions of Bahr El Ghazal and Upper Nile; the terrain can be divided into four land classes: Highlands: higher than the surrounding plains by only a few centimeters. Vegetation consists of open thorn open mixed woodland with grasses. Intermediate Lands: lie below the highlands subject to flooding from heavy rainfall in the Ethiopian and East/Central African highlands.

Toic: land seasonally inundated or saturated by the main rivers and inland water-courses, retaining enough moisture throughout the dry season to support cattle grazing. Sudd: permanent swampland below the level of the toic. Ecology of large basin is unique; the Dinka's migrations are determined by the local climate, their agro-pastoral lifestyle responding to the periodic flooding and dryness of the area in which they live. They begin moving around May–June at the onset of the rainy season to their “permanent settlements” of mud and thatch housing above flood level, where they plant their crops of millet and other grain products; these rainy seas

Magdalene Mary Szubanski is an Australian television and film actress and writer. Szubanski's career started as a writer and performer of sketch comedy and has since progressed to production of TV, film acting, musical theatre, she starred in Full Frontal, Kath & Kim where she played Sharon Strzelecki, in the films Babe and Babe: Pig in the City as Esme Hoggett. In 2015, she released her memoir Reckoning, she trusted personality. In 2017, she became one of the most prominent faces of the same-sex marriage campaign in Australia and the co-chair of Australian Marriage Equality rated her crucial in the success of the "Yes" campaign. On 26 January 2019, Szubanski was appointed an officer in the general division of the Order of Australia for distinguished service to the performing arts as an actor and writer, as a campaigner for same-sex marriage. Szubanski was born on 12 April 1961, in England, her mother Margaret came from a poor family. Her father, Zbigniew Szubanski, came from a well-off Polish family and, as recorded in the official archives of the Warsaw Uprising Museum, was an assassin in a counter-intelligence branch of the Polish resistance movement in World War II.

Her cousin is Polish actress Magdalena Zawadzka. She attended high school at Siena College and studied fine arts and philosophy at the University of Melbourne. Szubanski graduated with a Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Arts in 2016. In 1976, as a Year 10 student, she captained a team on the television quiz. In 1985, while performing in a University of Melbourne Law Revue of Too Cool for Sandals, with Michael Veitch and Tom Gleisner, Szubanski was talent-spotted by producers from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, who convinced her to join up with some other university friends in creating a television sketch comedy show, The D-Generation. Szubanski was part of the team that created the television sketch comedy Fast Forward for the Seven Network, in which she played various characters, including Pixie-Anne Wheatley, Chenille from the Institute de Beauté, Wee Mary MacGregor, Joan Kirner, Michelle Grogan and other characters; the character of Lynne Postlethwaite was first performed on the ABC's The D-Generation.

It was written by John Allsop and Andrew Knight, but from Fast Forward on Szubanski co-wrote the sketches, created and co-wrote her characters. In 1995, she and friends Gina Riley and Jane Turner wrote and produced the first all-female Australian sketch comedy television program; when Riley and Turner developed the sketch-characters they had created into the sitcom Kath & Kim, Szubanski joined them to play Sharon Strzelecki, a character she had created herself. Her character Sharon "pashed" and "married" Australian cricketing legend Shane Warne, she "pashed" the late Australian actor Heath Ledger on the red carpet at the AFI awards in 2006 while in the role of Sharon, acting as an assistant stage manager. In 1999, Szubanski created, wrote, co-produced and starred as Margaret O'Halloran in the Dogwoman series of TV films, a detective style show based on the idea an expert "dog-whisperer" who, by treating problem dogs, inadvertently stumbles upon and solves human crimes. In 2009, she appeared on Who Do You Think You Are? where she explored her father's Polish Resistance activities as well as the story of her shell-shocked Irish grandfather and her sculptor ancestor Luigi Isepponi who assisted in making the Death mask for William Burke, half of the duo Burke and Hare, notorious grave robbers and serial killers.

From 3 September 2018, Szubanski recurred as Jemima Davies-Smythe on Neighbours. Her character officiated the first same-sex wedding on Australian television. On 8 April 2019, she appeared as "Guest Announcer" on Chris & Julia's Sunday Night Takeaway's season finale where she participated in a number of roles. Szubanski starred in the 1995 film Babe as Esme Hoggett, she reprised her role in Babe: Pig in the City. She teamed up again with director/producer George Miller to voice the role of Miss Viola in the animated films Happy Feet and Happy Feet Two. In 2007, she had a minor role as the housemaid in The Golden Compass to Lyra Belacqua. In 2015, Szubanski released her award-winning memoir Reckoning. In 2016 the book won several awards and beat some of Australias top literary authors to win the TBA. Reckoning won the $40,000 Douglas Stewart Prize for Nonfiction and "Book of the Year" and "Biography of the Year" at the Australian Book Industry Awards. While the book is nominally an autobiography, it is in large part about her father Zbigniew Szubanski, an assassin working for the Polish Resistance during World War 2.

Reckoning deals with the themes of intergenerational trauma, the possible genetic inheritance of traumatic memory and Szubanski's struggles with her own sexuality in the shadow of this legacy. Reviewer Peter Craven in The Australian said it would "dazzle every kind of reader" and described it as "a riveting, overwhelmingly poignant autobiography by a woman of genius, it is a book about. It is a daughter's love for her father, it is an extraordinary hymn to the tragic heroism at the heart of ordinary life and the soaring moral scrutiny of womankind. Every library should have it, every school should teach it."Richard Ferguson in The Sydney Morning Herald wrote, "This is documentary writing of the highest order and Szubanski has given life to an incredible war story…Reckoning, this tale of war and

Addison Sod House is a Saskatchewan homestead site made of grass or sod, over a hundred years old and has been designated as a National Historic Site of Canada. This sod home was used by James Addison and his family 10 miles north of Kindersley, Canada and 6.5 miles east on Highway 21. His property held two sheds, shelterbelt as well as dugout. Sod houses were a popular construction choice in the early 1900s by the early homesteaders to Saskatchewan and were similar to an earth sheltering type of house. Whereas many earth sheltering houses were built into hills, a'soddie' had the base dug down about 3 feet below the residence square footage area. A layer of buffalo, oxen or cattle chips, covered over with a well packed layer of clay; the walls were made of pieces of sod 4 inches deep, 3 feet wide, 4 to 5 feet long. These sod pieces were laid in overlapping fashion to construct all four walls; these walls would provide shelter in its enclosed space from precipitation, wind and the cold of 40 degree below winters, insulation against the heat of 40 degree above summers.

The roofs were made of aspen logs laid across the walls, these logs covered in sod. Heavy spring rains were the main downfall of these homes as the sod on the roof, dried out from winter, only supported with the logs would wash away with the water. Most homesteaders used the sod house as a temporary house until a wooden or brick structure was built; this particular sod house had several unique features which has helped it to survive until this day, nearly a century after first construction. The sod chosen were from a dried up waterlogged area or a dried up slough so the grass roots were quite thick. Sods are overlapped when made into walls, Addison made a hole in the center of each sod piece so that as the piece of sod dried it would tend to crumble in on itself, rather than outwards, he made each wall triangular, so that the width of the wall at the base was wider than the top. The roofs which were the downfall of most sod houses was not typical on Addison's Sod house, he departed from using sod for the roof, but made a wooden hip roof with wood shingles eliminating water damage from spring rains, winter snow melting.

Addison protected his sod walls from the elements, first by growing vines by covering the exterior with cedar shingles. With the advent new technologies in home construction, the cedar shingles were replaced with asphalt with vinyl siding. James Addison and his descendants have continuously occupied the house since its construction; the family received an award for long term stewardship of a heritage property from Saskatchewan's lieutenant governor in 2017. The Museum is affiliated with: CMA, CHIN, Virtual Museum of Canada. Earth sheltering Canada's Historic Places Legion Magazine Addison Sod House National Historic Site - Canada's History