Outdoor Play

From this summer, Perth’s beloved Kings Park features a special new place for children and families to connect with nature; empowering them to become more informed, caring and effective environmental custodians of tomorrow.

The Rio Tinto Naturescape in Kings Park is a new environmental discovery and learning facility situated within Kings Park’s six hectare Arboretum site, on May Drive. The bush landscape setting will offer opportunities for children and families to explore, investigate, imagine, create and experience the wonders of the natural Western Australian environment. The project is the first of its kind in Australia.

“Outdoor play is an important part of healthy development for young children; giving them the freedom to explore, to get dirty, climb, run in the rain, touch plants and insects and feel the water on their feet,” says Kings Park CEO Mark Webb.

“The opening of Rio Tinto Naturescape Kings Park is set to reinvigorate the way children play by giving them those experiences and by reconnecting them to nature.”

One of the key drivers for the project was the need to create opportunities for urban children to play outside in the natural environment, with new research highlighting the importance of unstructured outdoor play for healthy childhood development.

Mr Webb remarks, “Older Australians can remember a time when nature offered children the delights of outdoor free play, we had access to a world at large where we could play and explore outside with little or no supervision. Now many young children are more connected to the TV, games consoles and computers and spend very little time interacting with the natural environment.”

Nature Deficit Disorder is a term coined by Richard Louv in his 2005 book Last Child in the Woods, and refers to the alleged trend that children are spending less time outdoors and are disconnected from nature, with detrimental results. Studies have shown that an outdoor learning environment effects the positive development of children’s motor skills, senses, emotion, intellect, individual growth and social interaction, and importantly, helps develop an appreciation of nature.

Some of the innovative nature based play and discovery areas in the Rio Tinto Naturescape include:

• The Spring. The water source for all water bodies in the site, the Spring features large granite rocks with ‘mixing bowls’ honed into them for imaginative play and a five metre high tree hide, offering a bird’s eye view of the site.
• A cubby building zone gives children the opportunity to build cubbies using natural materials such as branches and sticks.
• The Prickly Thicket at the end of a raised steel boardwalk contains steel nest-like structures that children can climb into and discover interesting items like rocks, seed pods and feathers.
• The Tangle is a secluded area featuring a series of ‘upside-down trees’ connected by a web of climbing ropes for children to manoeuvre between.
• The Water Corporation Wetland where visitors can explore a wetland environment, learn about the importance of biodiversity and ecological processes, and observe flora and fauna habitats associated with wetlands. Two more “tree hides” are found here: a three metre hide overlooking the wetland, and a seven metre hide, providing a lookout amongst the tree canopy.
• The wheelchair accessible Kulunga Gully, a walled gully which zig-zags through part of the site below the natural ground level and the Boomerang Bridge, crossing a billabong.

Gathering and learning areas have also been created for school groups, families and communities, and next year will be complemented by a new earth covered Kings Park Education building, built to the highest environmental standards.

The Rio Tinto Naturescape at Kings Park will be open year-round, excluding February.