This afternoon, a friend from town has bought two of his sons out to Kandimulla to do a bit of bush bashing and spotlighting in an old 4wd Suzuki that they have specially modified for the purpose. They were all smiles and anticipation as they drove off in their little yellow terror complete with roof mounted spotlight, stickers and bulbar.
It made me start to think about youth activities and what a kid living in town gets up to over the school holidays. For many years, council has run a number of school holiday activities with things as diverse as movie making lessons to talent quests and triathlons.
Many people say that young people of today rely too much on other people to provide them with their entertainment instead of having the initiative to make their own fun. While there may be some truth in this, one of the largest reasons that kids don’t make their own fun is because society will no longer let them. I think back to when I was a kid, riding my pushbike around without a helmet, building cubbies in the bushes and grass on the riverbank and jumping feet first into the murky waterholes in the river on a hot day. I can even remember at age 12 belting along the Muckadilla-Ashmount road in an old grey EH Holden sedan and getting excited because while trying to see how fast we could go, at 70 mph, we hit a patch of corrugations that gave the radio such a shakeup that it finally started to work! I guess I was luckier than a lot of others because I grew up in the bush.
Even the mere mention of such activities causes most parents to break out in a cold sweat! To allow a child to undertake some of these activities would see the parent branded as “irresponsible” before you could blink!
Many years ago, I was Mayor of the Booringa Youth Council and we actively planned and promoted activities FOR kids run BY kids. We ran activities such as Pool parties, Movie nights and even at one stage operated a kids FM radio station in conjunction with the school, Sadly though, the Youth Council has since folded.
10 years ago, we had a scout troop in Mitchell and in Roma, I was Scout leader for the Mitchell troop for a number of years and I remember taking the kids canoeing, abseiling and night orienteering, but I ended up giving it away when it got to the point where in order to spend 4 hours canoeing, you would have to do 6 hours of paperwork at least a fortnight in advance and send it all off for approval before you could even think of putting a canoe in the water.
Both Mitchell and Roma have lost their Scout troops, Mitchell has also lost its youth council. If we are stopping kids from being able to have their own spontaneous fun, then we have an obligation to provide opportunities for them. I don’t want to suggest we go back to the days before soft fall in playgrounds even though we grew up without it and didn’t get hurt (Much).
Council provides funding for a school holiday programme and a number of other activities, but I think I would like to see more done. We need to ensure that we keep our kids engaged in their community in order to retain them in our community. Kids are our future, what is the point of building our communities if we are alienating our future? Surely, failing to do so is dooming us all to failure?
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