In the land of camps

According to Dr Bill Garner, Australians are divided into those who camp and those who don’t. Charlie Stevens, World War I soldier, adventurer, and inventor of the Pyramid Tent, did.

Charlie Stevens’ story, recorded in a hand-written memoir, reads like the stuff of legend. 

After emigrating from the UK, the 18- year-old enlisted in the Australian Imperial Force in 1914 to serve as a stretcher bearer, first at Gallipoli and then in France where, outside Amiens, he was struck by a daisy cutter (a shell with an impact fuse designed to explode immediately on touching the ground).

After a series of operations, Charlie’s legs were amputated below the knee. But, according to his family, Charlie remained a force to be reckoned with, stoic and determined always to live an active life. This he did, pursuing his love of camping, swimming, bike riding, horse riding, dancing – all on his wooden legs.

Charlie reckons that it was the war that engendered in him a love of camping, first experienced before he even left Australian shores at the army reception and training camp at Broadmeadows – a veritable tent city – and thereafter in camps behind the lines at the various fronts he served on throughout Europe and the Middle East. 

“Camping is essential to the Australian experience,” says Dr Bill Garner who completed a PhD on the topic in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. “[It] connects you directly to the earth and sky, vegetation, animals and especially birds. The strength of the wind, the power of the waves…they overwhelm you. You understand the scale of things and your own place.” 

Dr Garner’s doctoral thesis, ‘Land of Camps: the ephemeral settlement of Australia’, which won the Australian Historical Association’s biennial Serle Award in 2012 for the best postgraduate thesis in Australian History, was completed under the supervision of Professor John Murphy and Associate Professor Andrew May. This award was preceded in 2010 with the Faculty of Arts’ Dennis-Wettenhall Prize for research work in the field of Australian history and in particular the history of pioneering and land settlement in Australia.

Dr Garner contends that his study, enlarging as it does the history of Australian settlement by placing tents in the foreground of the historical landscape, reimagines the material and social circumstances as well as the cultural evolution that accompanied the highly uncertain process of colonisation.

“The absence of tents from existing histories, except as ‘colour’, is a consequence of historians’ favouring received ideas of civilisation, progress and permanence,” says Dr Garner.

“The corollary to this has been a de-emphasis of the dependence of settlers on temporary habitation. A re-balancing of the narrative required a concept of ‘ephemeral settlement’ to define the recurring periods between arrival and permanent occupation where the camp emerges as a site of contact, possibility, and new beginnings.”

‘Land of Camps’ explores periods of colonial cycles of dependence on tents and other temporary structures, from the first English camp at Sydney Cove, to settlers and pastoralists taking up nomadic existence living under tarpaulins and in versions of Aboriginal bark shelters in what Dr Garner sees as a largely unrecognised cross-cultural sharing of knowledge arising from unavoidable common circumstances. 

It also covers the long periods of unsettlement in which a large proportion of the population camped out during the gold rushes, shearers’ union camps in the second half of the 19th century, and the persistent and ongoing enthusiasm of middle-class urban dwellers to go camping.

“A study of imagery of camping in both literature and art shows how camping became positively embedded in the minds of Australians and came to have symbolic meaning,” says Dr Garner. “The family holiday camping that emerged in the 1890s resonated, and resonates still, with associations particular to the history of the ephemeral settlement of Australia.”

For Charlie Stevens, who loved swimming but hated being dependent on people to carry him to the water, campsites like the one he found in the early 1930s outside Warrnambool, provided the answer. Charlie’s memoir describes how, camping beside the banks of the Hopkins River, he could row out in a small boat, take off his legs and swim to his heart’s content. 

For the next 50 years Charlie shared the camping experience with his family passing on the tradition to his wife Maude, six children, and scores of their grandchildren and extended family.

www.shaps.unimelb.edu.au