The AG met recently to discuss various issues.
We inspected two of the large informal bush camping sites to look firsthand at some of the problems. Many people like the freedom of camping away from established sites, but when too many love the same spot it quickly becomes degraded. For instance the Golton Gorge site has had five school groups descend on it the same week, with up to 150 children. There are no toilets, and no authorised fireplaces. The large numbers then mean the cleared areas keep growing. Currently bush camping is free and there is no booking system. To exacerbate the situation, while many school groups contact the Park about their visit, others just turn up, spend a few days and depart without any contact. We agreed there is a need to begin to regulate, and to look to ways to require larger groups to book. The questions of fees, possible need for groups to provide their own toilets, and educating group users about the impact they are having were flagged and left for further discussion.
A similar problem is that of some climbers ignoring the rules about climbing, destroying vegetation and leaving bolts in rock faces. See Graham’s article for more on this.
Two staff from the DSE’s Learning Network talked to us about community attitudes to fire, and how to progress real exchange of ideas between groups, so they can see where the others are coming from. The fire conference report shows how necessary this is, and the AG and Park staff will explore ways of following this up.
Our next meeting is in early February and will be followed later in the month with a visit to Wilson’s Prom NP where we will look at some of their challenges and meet with their AG.