Learning from the bush

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Nadia Wheatley

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The opposition of the city to the bush was, of course, one of the great topics of late nineteenth century Australia. Although beaten up by Bulletin writers and cartoonists, it was arguably part of the process of transforming immigrants into Australians. At the very least, the public debate meant that those who lived in coastal cities could not forget the land behind their backs.

Even in the 1950s, when I was growing up, this opposition was still regarded as a natural polarity: like the difference between winter and summer, or northern and southern hemispheres. With monotonous regularity, at school we were asked to debate the proposition ‘It is better to live in the city than the bush' (or vice versa).

And yet something that was neglected in all this was that, until the 1950s and even the 1960s, most Australian children growing up in cities were acquainted with the bush. It was a place they inhabited not just when they went to stay with country relatives for a holiday, but every weekend or even every afternoon as they played.

For example, when I was a very young child living on Sydney's North Shore, my mother frequently took me through the bush of Lane Cove, where she herself had played as a child in the 1920s. As we walked, she taught me the names of indigenous plants and birds. We collected insects and tadpoles in jars (letting them out again after a day or so). When I was seven, we were living in the suburb of Denistone. Every day as I walked home alone from the train station, I passed through a bush gully, where I would stop and explore for a while with no thought of being molested by a strange man or catching a disease from the rubbish that was already starting to pollute the tiny creek.

On the south-west side of Sydney, in the same era, a boy called Ken Searle was spending his free time in the Wolli Creek Valley, which was in easy walking distance of his Kingsgrove home. With other boys in his gang, he collected melting bitumen from the road on hot days and used it to waterproof the canoes they made from rusty sheets of corrugated iron and paddled down the creek. When the boys were a little older, the same bush valley provided a hideout where they would go to smoke cigarettes.

Four decades later, our cities probably have even more areas of accessible bushland (thanks to the lobbying of environmentalists), but I wonder how many children are in the habit of using it – either alone, or with other kids, or even in the company of an adult.

One reason is that children are busy with the demanding attractions of organised sport, television, computer games, music lessons and studying to get into a selective secondary school. An even more powerful reason is the combined fear of traffic and strangers which prevents parents from allowing their offspring to disappear and do things by themselves.

Because this alienation of urban children from the bush has been happening over the last few decades, we now have a generation of parents who have never played in the bush, who would not feel comfortable clambering up a rock shelf, and who could barely tell the difference between a wattle and a gum tree. Add to this the fact that our society has received, since the 1970s, successive waves of immigrants to whom the country seems as alien as it did to the first generations of British immigrants. For many people who have recently arrived from Beirut or Ho Chi Minh City, the only time they see the bush is when a television news report shows it on fire. Why would they take their children into it?