The Ways of the Bushwalker by Melissa Harper

Author:Melissa Harper
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: NewSouth Publishing
Published: 2020-09-14T00:00:00+00:00

THE FATHER OF BUSHWALKING

By the 1920s Dunphy had developed a considerable reputation for his knowledge of the bushwalking country of New South Wales. In 1922 he gave three lectures on walking and campcraft to students at the Sydney Technical College, where he had just begun a full-time teaching position in the department of architecture. As a result, three new clubs emerged. Around the same time the government tourist bureau began to direct public enquiries to him. Never one for half measures, Dunphy’s replies often included detailed directions, observations on the terrain and a hand-drawn sketch map. On the one hand, Dunphy found this an onerous task.17 At the same time, this public recognition of his expertise bolstered his belief that he and his fellow trailers could claim to have established a new recreation.

For Dunphy, being first conferred a status that had to be jealously guarded. When the Bush Trails Club (BTC) formed in 1922, Dunphy wrote them a letter of complaint. While welcoming the newcomers to the ‘walking and bush-loving fraternity’, Dunphy went on to accuse the club of taking half the title of his MTC. He argued that being the ‘inventors’ of trailing gave his club ‘priority of right’ over the term ‘trail’ and he took the extraordinary step of asking the new club to choose another name. A heated exchange followed and, although upset by the accusation, the new club obliged, renaming itself the Bush Tracks Club.18

With a view to historical posterity, Dunphy compiled a mammoth archive. In beautiful script but often mind-numbing detail he wrote an account of almost every walk he undertook. These journals encompass seventy-two volumes. Dunphy also kept the correspondence, minutes and annual reports of the walking and conservation organisations he was involved in. He collected books, newspaper and magazine articles on matters of interest to walkers. And he wrote pages and pages on the history of walking, almost always placing his own tours as the point when bushwalking began. The collection, housed in Sydney’s Mitchell Library, is a testament to a lifetime of recreational walking and environmental campaigning, and to a philosophy regarding the importance of wild places in the modern world.

Dunphy acknowledged that others had gone before him but none were ‘real’ walkers. He admired the athletic members of Walkers Limited, a club that had formed in 1909, but because they focused on speed and did not camp they could not be called trailers. Similarly, Dunphy characterised the members of William Mogford Hamlet’s Warragamba Walking Club as ‘one hundred per cent English gentlemen walkers’ because they liked to travel light and to sleep overnight at an inn.19 This was not always the case. They too sometimes went off track and slept rough. Dunphy also overlooked the history of walking outside New South Wales where, as we’ve seen, walkers like Robert Croll, Romeo Lahey and Ronald Smith had been undertaking extended walking and camping trips from the turn of the century.

Historians and many bushwalkers have been happy to crown Dunphy the ‘father of bushwalking’ and to trace the beginnings of the bushwalking club movement to the MTC.

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