Creating Wildlife Adventures: Making your place an environmental adventure

Had a great day at the Fordsdale Hall today with all of the children, artists, carers and Land for Wildlife experts and participants.

Fordsdale Hall is one of those lovely little basic country halls that dot the rural landscape. Corro iron and hardwood, stage and toilets and on end, kitchen on the verandah and plenty of space surrounding it to park cars, create music and create art.

The storytellers got to work inside away from the rural distractions of green ants, cattle trucks and landslipped hills. The children were divided into three groups - wombats, kangaroos and echidnas and rotated around the artists - Richard van Luyn and Rob McGrigor and myself.

Those that did painting first moved onto music and then storytelling etc. We decided that each story should be one butchers paper sheet long and either be about what the music session was about or it could be about their favourite catchment animal. Of course that meant local settings and almost always one of the characters was the child themselves.

 Geckoes Wildlife Animal presenters did a quite wonderful live animal warmup. Children got to see and a touch frill necked lizard, blue tongue lizard, carpet snake, glider, brushtail possum, barking owl, tawny frogmouth and a bandicoot.

I'll add all of the stories we created to this Catchy Lockyer Stories blog over the next week or two so keep a look out.