Take an awesome walk on the wild side with Nature Festival
This Nature Festival, nature program curator Jill Woodlands is urging you to take a guided walk in one of the lesser explored, green areas of the City of Adelaide.
The theme for this year’s Nature Festival is ‘awe’ – something its nature curator Jill Woodlands said can be felt in abundance on a guided walk through the city’s green spaces.
Woodlands described Nature Festival as “a platform for storytelling and engagement”, supporting people to connect with different aspects of nature, including the native animals that are living in the city and suburban backyards.
“The more we know about different aspects of nature, the more we’re able to love nature, and also perhaps be more accommodating [to the fauna and flora],” she said.
While the program offers more than 400 events that span the state, the leadership team is surprisingly small – just Woodlands, festival director Ryan Hubbard, arts and culture creator Amber Cronin and festival chair Vicki-Jo Russell, who are assisted by a similarly lean support team of four.
The team have a long history of collaboration, with Nature Festival coming out of a project they were working on to save the state’s biodiversity.
“Out of that came some principles about what we need to do to move forward,” Woodlands explained.
“One of those was we need to get back to reminding ourselves what we love about nature.”
You might like
Through Nature Festival, she said, the team “basically tell as many stories as possible” about people’s interaction with and love for nature.
Woodlands is determined to unlock spaces passers-by might normally be oblivious to.
“Showing people nature that they might walk through every day but not realise what they’re looking at, or gardens they might not have considered visiting before,” she explained.
Talk a guided walk through Adelaide’s newest park, Kuri Kurri, behind Lot Fourteen. Photo: supplied
With Chihuly in the Botanic Garden expected to draw huge numbers of visitors to Adelaide Botanic Garden daily, looking at event locations across the breadth of the city also made sense.
In the Adelaide Park Lands, which cover more than 760 hectares, the many walks on offer will tell both the natural and cultural histories of our local environment.
This year, the Adelaide Park Lands Authority completed the second phase of its biodiversity survey, which Woodlands said produced “some remarkable discoveries”. These form the basis of several walks.
“In Golden Wattle Park/Mirnu Wirra, there are some fabulous species of plants and butterflies that have been discovered,” Woodlands said.
Stay informed, daily
“In the south east Park Lands, Victoria Park/Pakapakanthi in particular, we’re looking at the cultural burn that was done about four years ago – the first one done since pre-1836 – and seeing what has resulted from that.”
That walk will also take in the miyawaki (pocket forest) planting intended to spur a rapid increase in biodiversity, with citizen scientists encouraged to upload their sightings on the iNaturalist app.
The city walks program also includes a look at the City of Adelaide’s first ‘City Gardener’ August Pelzer, hosted by Professor Chris Daniels, and an exploration of Kuri Kurru – Place of Turning Seasons behind Lot Fourteen, designed by landscape architects Oxigen with cultural layering codesigned by Karl Winder Telfer.
There will also be a guided night walk through Reservoir Park/Kangatilla in North Adelaide to learn about the microbats, possums and other species found there.
Woodlands is also interested in opening up remarkable spaces and telling quirky stories, like ones about follies, ornamental but practically useless structures.
Government House will open its gardens to the public during Nature Festival. Photo: courtesy of Government House
Government House Open Day on October 13 ticks both boxes with its folly, she said.
“It’s probably Adelaide’s smallest Mediterranean garden and it’s in the old swimming pool inside the Government House grounds, so it’s just a little folly.”
Nature Festival has events running across the state, from the Limestone Coast, to Eyre Peninsula, to Flinders Ranges and the Outback.
The incredibly diverse program has lots to appeal to everyone, whether they are looking to engage as a family or with mates in the pub. Find plenty of the former here, and for the latter, Woodlands recommended Flight of the Bin Chicken, Birds & Bingo, Nature Trivia and Park Quiz.
The comprehensive cultural program offers a connection with nature through music, arts and creativity, and Aboriginal culture, while those seeking a profound sense of calm and wellbeing can find it in the wellness events.
The intent of the festival is perhaps best summed up in Returning platypus to the river: Turning a dream into a reality, a talk on a rewilding project underway by Green Adelaide.
“If they’re successful in reintroducing platypus in parts of the Torrens,” said Woodlands, “I think that it makes us very hopeful about what is possible.”
Nature Festival runs until Sunday, 13 October. See the full program.
