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Script of Mr. Brookes's Lecture, #2 |
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Reporter admin ,
Date 20040405
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The importance of outdoor activities in shaping environmental knowledge in Australia.
Some Australians live in rural areas, and have an outdoor life. However, most Australians live in cities that resemble many other cities around the globe.
For these Australians outdoor recreation and sports are the main ways in which they experience the Australian environment. Like the first English settlers, urban Australians come to the bush with ideas and practices formed somewhere else, if not in Europe then in cities so influenced by European ideas that they could be in Europe. Thus the importation of ideas ill-suited to the particular Australian environment is not so much a historical fact as recurring theme, and a contemporary problem.
In this presentation I focus primarily on relationships between outdoor experiences and environmental knowledge. The discussion could go in a different direction, and consider connections between outdoor activities, place, militaristic nationalism and racism [9]. This is a matter for another presentation, but it is a reminder, if one is needed, that there are many possible outcomes from outdoor activities when they are used for education. Western environmentalism sometimes contains a romantic theme, that returning to nature will automatically have certain benefits and will grant certain insights. The colonisation of Australia could be thought of as an experiment in which people from industrial England returned to nature by coming to Australia. Plainly the contact with nature which the early English settlers like my great great Grandfather had did not lead automatically to a more environmentally sustainable society. It is necessary to look more closely at the details of particular outdoor activities in order to understand how ideas are woven into them.
An example. ¡ÈBushwalking¡É in the state of Victoria.
Australia was settled as four separate colonies, later becoming a Federation of six states. There are differences between the states, so it is helpful to begin a specific discussion about the social and cultural dimensions of outdoor activity in one region.
Melbourne, the Victorian capital, sprawls on a coastal plain. The most popular dwelling in the suburbs was for many years a single-storey detached house on a ¡Èquarter acre¡É block; consequently, the city covers a large area. Rural land on the city outskirts is mostly privately owned farmland (to which there is no right of public access), or forms part of a closed catchment for the city water supply. One must travel through the suburbs and past the surrounding farms or water reserves to reach public land, while the vegetation in the bush is different to that encountered in parks and gardens in Melbourne, which are almost entirely alien. There may be ¡Ènative¡É plants in gardens, but these may well be from locations thousands of kilometres away. The ¡Èbush¡É and the city are quite separate worlds.
At least some of Melbourne¡Çs population were interested in the Australian bush, and wanted to experience it. One way was through an activity called ¡Èbushwalking¡É. (A similar activity would be called hiking in the USA). While bushwalking appealed to a relatively small proportion of the urban population (except during the hiking boom of the 1930s [10]), it is clear from books and articles about bushwalking in the years around World War II that those who became bushwalkers wanted to become familiar with their part of
Australia. Early bushwalkers were mostly professional urban dwellers who regularly visited the bush in groups, carrying what they needed on their backs, and often camping overnight in small tents. They would travel by train or in the back of trucks to areas of public land that had not been cleared for farming, and go walking, sometimes for many days.
In the early years, a bushwalker was someone who ¡Èknew the bush¡É. Accurate topographic maps were not available, and bushwalking clubs allowed knowledge to be shared, through written accounts of trips, contacts with local stockmen who grazed cattle in the bush under licence, sketch maps made on previous trips, and above all through providing relationships with experienced and trusted individuals. New bushwalkers were not taught skills so much as inducted into a knowledge-based social network. A guide was a person who knew an area, through experience.
Around the early 1970¡Çs, a number of schools began to offer bushwalking programs. These early bushwalking trips contributed to the development of outdoor education, the field in which I teach. However, outdoor education in Victoria was also influenced by imported ideas, especially from the United Kingdom and north America. Bushwalking was an activity that responded to local geography; imported forms of outdoor education used activities derived from the Canadian lakes and rivers, and from the more rugged landscapes of Wales and Scotland. While Victorians did not send children to Summer camps, North American parents did, and outdoor education in Victoria also imported ideas from North American organised camping. One effect of these influences was to shift the emphasis of outdoor education from visiting the bush in the region to searching for locations in which to practice imported activities which were not really a good match to the Australian geography. Another effect was to shift the educational focus from the bush to the individual, or the group.
Australian outdoor education absorbed from the UK
ideas of building ¡Ècharacter¡É through outdoor adventures [11, 12], and communitarian idealism from American camping. (America was established as a religious utopia, which Australia was not).
The activity of bushwalking itself changed when it became part of formal education. The bushwalking guide (or teacher) was expected to be expert in technical navigation, rather than simply one who knew a particular areas of bush. Topographic map-reading and navigation using a compass became central to bushwalking instruction. Maps originally developed for the military provided information that enabled the technically competent to plan a bushwalk as a strategic exercise in unknown terrain. Competence based not on familiarity with a region could thereby be substituted with its opposite; the definitive test of leadership was a navigation exercise in an unfamiliar place. This approach was not militaristic in intent, but it contained a way of thinking about navigation that was militaristic.
At two extremes, navigation can be approached using the knowledge and world view of an invading military force with no local knowledge but advanced technology, or from the perspective of a local defending force with little technology but who know the country. The sport of orienteering ? competitive cross country navigation, based on maps using standardised information similar to military maps, and with very little if any local cultural information, contains within it an invaders¡É perspective of the land as a strange place, offering strategic challenges than can be overcome with strength and skill. This might be contrasted with older traditions of mountain guiding, earlier forms of bushwalking, and aboriginal ways of knowing, in which local experience was essential. This simple example probably opens more questions than it answers, but it illustrates how modern outdoor sports can contain within them the perspective not of a resident who is learning how to live with the land, but of an invader who uses technical knowledge as a substitute for local knowledge.
This is, of course, a short version of a long story. But it illustrates how tensions between understanding and responding to the local environment are present in outdoor education in the choice of locations and activity, in details of an activity, and in the underlying aims. I suspect the same tensions may be seen in many of the ways in which urban Australians experience the bush.
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