An eastern rosella sang from a high perch atop a rope ladder in Legacy Park on the Queens Domain.
The children’s park was established a few years back as a nature-based play space and the singing rosella was a powerful affirmation of what the Hobart Council had achieved with its design.
Children and their exposure to nature had been very much part of my focus this year after I read about the “playground revolution” that the Age newspaper in Melbourne said was sweeping the country.
The newspaper specifically mentioned the Nature Play site in Melbourne’s Royal Park and on a recent visit to the Victorian capital I set out to explore what flora and fauna it had to offer.
The park and the trees, shrubs and flowers planted within it reflect the seven seasons on the calendar of the indigenous Wurundjeri people. My visit coincided with the “dry” season before the “luk” or eel season of early autumn.
The park is also a wonderland of climbing ropes, water play areas and glades but revelling in this urban landscape I felt Hobart had something better.
Call me parochial, but a visit to the Domain as soon as I returned from Melbourne – serenaded by not just rosellas but magpies, butcherbirds and musk lorikeets – confirmed that Legacy Park ticked all the boxes of park design mentioned by the Age, and more.
The new-age parks are designed to challenge children to be bold and adventurous. They are invited to climb, clamber and use their imagination.
On the Domain, discovery gardens, climbing walls and lookouts form part of the experience. The Hobart playscape was developed using feedback from local schools and community groups to create a space where even the BBQ facilities include wood-fired pizza ovens.
The nature parks are not just for play, however. In the age of social media and internet games it has become more important than ever before to lure children away from computers and into the great outdoors. There’s a generally held belief that children are losing contact with nature, and to a large degree this is being corrected by an increase in nature study on the school curriculum.
The new-age, eco-friendly parks are also designed to act as open-air classrooms.
The modern approach to children’s play has also throw up an interesting side issue.
A researcher on playground design, Fatemah Aminpour, argues that the traditional notion of play space discriminates against girls. Because boys tend to play more team sports, they are given bigger areas, the girls being left with what Dr Aminpour describes as “left-over spaces”.
She says this can be corrected by giving girls quiet, secluded spaces like flower gardens, or seating arrangements – as with the circles of logs and sandstone boulders at Legacy Park – where girls can gather to talk or listen to the songs of birds, including the sweet twitter of the rosella.