(A more detailed description of my volunteer work in Australia and New Zealand can be found at the end of my Travel Writing post, the link is at the bottom of my Home Page.)
5 April – 15 May 2009
I arrived in Melbourne Victoria on 1st April 2009 to begin my 6 weeks volunteering with CVA. A varied and interesting programme had been drawn up ensuring we went to a new site each week. The work included Fencing on a large sheep station in western Victoria – Forest fire clearance in the aftermath of the Victoria bush fires disaster of February 2009 – Small mammal survey in the Grampian Mountains Park of western Victoria – Planting and weeding of car park at Rosebud on Mornington Peninsular – Forest path clearance and maintenance at Beechworth National Park in Northern Victoria.
My fellow volunteers came from the UK, France, Korea, Taiwan and Australia. We worked well and quickly as a Team, sharing jokes and laughter and taking turns to cook and do the domestic chores in the evenings. Some of the customs of the Koreans in eating and washing-up were strange to a western eye such as mine, and I think more could have been done by CVA to induct all the volunteers at the beginning into the respective domestic and social customs of East and West, to avoid misunderstandings and hurt feelings. But the principle of the volunteering ethos held good throughout the 6 weeks, and I know our hosts were very grateful for the hard physical work we put in. For me the two most poignant memories were 1) the completely dried-up lake bed of Lake Bolac in western Victoria, which had been a thriving water-sports centre only 5 years previously – a combination of drought and wind had completely evaporated the water, leaving a devastatingly graphic reminder of global warming, and 2) the forest fires in the eucalypt forests north of Melbourne which had swept through the area only 2 months previously, killing nearly 200 people in Australia’s worst-ever bush fire disaster. We walked through the eerily silent splintered and blackened forest, completely covered in a thick layer of ash, leaving literally our ‘carbon footprints’ as we went, seeing the calcined skeletons of kangaroos, wallabies and wombats. As we left the area, underground coal seams were still smouldering, and crime-scene tape still surrounded the ruined foundations of dwellings where people had been killed. It was a nightmare scene, and the forests and local communities will take many years to recover. This was a shocking reminder that environmental disasters don’t just happen in poor countries, and that shortcomings in government policies towards bush and scrub clearance in even an affluent country like Australia can contribute to and exacerbate an actual environmental disaster.
CVA – New Zealand. 17 May – 5 July 2009
A country I had always wanted to visit. It certainly lived up to expectations. Mount Eden was CVA’s HQ in Auckland, a beautiful setting for a city surrounded by extinct volcanic cores and the most beautiful harbour in the world. Again a varied programme of water quality improvement, planting, clearance and path building– Rotoroa Island, Waitekare Ranges, Matata on the Bay of Plenty, Waiheke Island and urban planting and weed control around Auckland. Fiona McLoughlin was our lovely Kiwi leader. Young fellow volunteers from the UK, Belgium, Germany, Taiwan and Korea. We worked and gelled well together and the programme was well-managed. There was plenty of time at weekends to explore the city of Auckland and outlying islands, to see the indigenous and iconic New Zealand birds on the natural island reserve of Tiritiri Matangi, visit the great National Museum of New Zealand at The Domain and see the Maori culture and artefacts, and generally shop and relax in beautiful surroundings.
Volunteering is about helping other people, giving something back to a community or an environment, to see something of the world and discover other cultures, philosophies and ideas. You meet wonderful, like-minded people, you have a laugh and a cry, you hope you do something worthwhile and valued. But above all, you discover who YOU are, what motivates you, what values you really hold. If what you discover is good or bad, it doesn’t really matter – what matters is the discovery itself.
C. Tim Taylor. 2014