Dunphy's Kowmung Adventure - Re-enacting a historic walk in a national park
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Alex Allchin and Sierra Classin
Dunphy Kowmung Adventure
A re-enactment of a wilderness walk that invented the art of 'bushwalking' in Australia and involved the local community in several side events. The event assisted teams of young adventurers to rediscover the Blue Mountains region west of Sydney and the need for its on-going conservation effort, even though the area is now a national park inscribed on the World Heritage list of properties.
Last update: 02 Oct 2020
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Context
Challenges addressed
Attempting to reengage young people and the local community with the Blue Mountains region.
Location
Blue Mountains, Australia
Oceania
Process
Summary of the process
The elements of the Dunphy Kowmung Adventure enabled participants to engage in a walk on many levels. The artistic and cultural events enabled a deeper understanding of the wilderness landscape and its historical relationships. All these were integrated through the maps provided so that the young participants discover that nature conservation is a process, not an end point and that they would benefit by becoming involved with it.
Building Blocks
Dunphy Kowmung Adventure walk - Working Group
Creation of a team of volunteers to design and implement re-enactment of historic event.
Enabling factors
A core network of volunteers from a number of non-government conservation-based community groups who are inspired by the proposed re-enactment of a historic conservation achievement and a handful of young people keen to play a part as role models for others in the re-enactment. In this instance, conservation groups in the Blue Mountains worked with walking clubs, Rotary and an environmental education centre working with is association with the National Parks and Wildlife Service.
Lesson learned
An accurate record of decisions made by the volunteer working group, someone to drive the meeting processes, a sense of humour, patience with government agencies and bureaucracy, reach out to others once initial historical re-enactment concept has been defined.
Resources
Compiling historical material
Historical notes were compiled from the State Library, conservation and walking community groups a collection of extracts from historic diaries of a famous past conservationist, historical maps and photographs.
Enabling factors
Scanning old and fragile maps using a large format scanner. Digitally photographing historic documents and photographs at high resolution. Using all historic material collect to push the re-enactment event through social media to create a following in the general community.
Lesson learned
Capturing the enthusiasm of young people to undertake fairly simple historical research tasks will take them on a journey of discovering in their imagination. In doing so they will learn lessons from past events and how these relate to current conservation issues.
Resources
Compiling guide books
Guide books for the re-enactment event were compiled using the historical documents.
Enabling factors
Some skills in layout and design are required to compile guide books for the re-enactment event. Writing guide books requires time, money and the availability of someone who is suitably skilled to do the task. This is an ideal task for a retired park ranger or scientist to relive a part of history and make it come alive for the young people on the walk.
Lesson learned
Perfection is not essential, as long as there is adequate supervision of the publishing task. This time we ran out of time to achieve publication standard, but the walkers found the guide books very helpful to develop their understanding of the journey they were undertaking.
Resources
Impacts
The Dunphy’s Kowmung Adventure offers two lessons: 1/- Historical re-enactment of important nature conservation events can enable a broad cross-section of a local community to be involved in celebration of a significant conservation achievement. 2/- A re-enactment also provides a media publicity vehicle to get your message out about the on-going need for nature conservation, in this case wilderness protection. Even though Dunphy’s Kowmung Adventure was a re-enactment of a walk through remote wilderness, the side events involved many other people.
Beneficiaries
4.5 million Sydney residents enjoying a great many recreation opportunities and water supplies from the World Heritage listed wilderness national parks
Story
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