HIST2227 Chap.6 Environmental Politics
Environmental Politics
A walking club as evidence
Week 7 studies environmental politics through Ruby Ekkel’s history of the Melbourne Women’s Walking Club, founded in 1922 when women were shut out of existing clubs.
Members found adventure, friendship and new freedoms of dress in the bush.
Wilderness and its limits
Ekkel also shows that walkers assumed a right to colonised land and rarely considered Indigenous care for country, which is why the idea of wilderness is contested.
Questions the tutorial adds
The outline asks what ideas about native animals and plants appear in the 1937 Creed for Nature Lovers, whether Hutton and Connors’ two waves of environmental concern are a helpful way to divide the history, and what role bushwalking played in shaping environmental thought.
Ekkel’s club gives you one concrete case to test each of those questions against, from the founding in 1922 to 1945.
Writing about the case
When you use Ekkel in an essay, cite the club’s specific practices rather than general claims about women and nature: the communal billy, skirts removed once out of sight, programs planned around working women’s schedules.
Concrete details are what make a case study persuasive, and they show the marker you have read the article closely.
What this chapter covers
- 01
Founding the Melbourne Women's Walking Club
- 02
What men and women sought in the bush
- 03
Dress, cooking and respectability
- 04
An ethic of care and conservation
- 05
Wilderness and settler belonging
- 06
Two waves of environmental concern
Worked example · free
Using one club to answer a gender question
- 1Gender shaped practice: club women wore skirts on public transport and removed them in the bush, and shared cooking communally, whereas men in mixed clubs claimed camp cooking as masculine.
- 1Settler assumptions persisted: members, like male walkers, assumed a right to move through colonised land and gave little thought to Indigenous people's care for it.
Key terms
- Wilderness
- Land imagined as untouched and pristine, an idea that can erase the people who shaped it.
- Serious Leisure
- Recreation demanding skill and effort, as camp cooking in hard conditions made bushwalking.
- Ethic of Care
- Active concern for places and wildlife, which bushwalking fostered among many club members.
- Incipient Feminism
- Ekkel's description of the new ways club women behaved and dressed in the bush.
- Bushwalking Club
- An organised walking society; the Melbourne women's club began in 1922 when women were excluded from existing clubs.
Environmental Politics FAQ
Why was the Melbourne Women's Walking Club founded?
It began in October 1922, when partners of members of an all-male walking club formed their own society out of frustration at being excluded. Ekkel describes it as Australia's first women's walking club, with about seventy members by 1927.
Were the club's members environmental activists?
Ekkel finds the Melbourne club less involved in politics than the clubs in New South Wales, but shows walking fostered an ethic of care. The club was later represented on the Conservation Council of Victoria, and members such as Jean Blackburn worked on a report on national parks.
Why is wilderness a controversial idea?
Because imagining land as untouched can justify protecting it while erasing the Aboriginal people who shaped and cared for it. Ekkel shows walkers praising pristine country while sheltering in ruined buildings of earlier settlers and assuming their own right to move through colonised land.
How did club women's dress become political?
Members wore skirts on public transport and removed them once they were out of sight in the bush, and critics wrote to newspapers mocking women in trousers. Ekkel treats practical clothing as part of the new freedom the bush offered, so arguments over dress were arguments over women's place in public life.
What does settler nativity mean in Ekkel's argument?
It is a sense of belonging to the land that settler Australians developed, which Ekkel argues bushwalking encouraged. That feeling helped consolidate settler claims to control the environment, even while walkers fought particular kinds of destruction, and it left Indigenous care for country largely unacknowledged.
How large was the Melbourne Women's Walking Club?
Ekkel reports about seventy members by 1927, and membership stayed close to a hundred over the period she studies. The 1925 to 1926 program offered thirty-nine walks, and members paid a subscription of five shillings a year in 1922.
Assessment move
Write a two-column note of what men and women sought in the bush, then add one sentence on the settler assumption both shared; that structure answers most questions on this week. Add one example of the conservation work that grew out of walking, such as Jean Blackburn’s work on national parks.
For the Final Paper, the club also offers a model of how one small organisation can open a large historical question about gender and land.
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