Hope doesn’t glimmer - it burns!
A personal message from APA President, Shane Sody
I spend a lot of my time writing articles like this one for APA’s blog, our newsletter and our social media, as well as compiling and revising APA’s Trail Guides and taking Guided Walks to help you to EXPLORE your Adelaide Park Lands.
I am also often liaising with our team of Park Ambassadors and other volunteers. (We have too few volunteers - please join our team!)
It is a fulfilling, rewarding experience to connect with hundreds of people, mostly Park Lands supporters, on a daily basis. Our regular posts get hundreds of daily "likes" and comments, and provoke discussions across Adelaide.
APA President, Shane Sody
Some of our news stories get picked up by mainstream media, such as this one on 5 January by The Advertiser / Adelaide Now ($$ subscriber-only link), which brought our blog post of 30 December 2023 to a wider audience.
Our communications and advocacy for your Park Lands, speaking on behalf of hundreds of APA members, and thousands of Park Lands supporters, is slowly helping to shape the political narrative.
Nevertheless, politicians, including a majority within the State Government, still appear to see your Park Lands as merely vacant building sites, or a “land bank”.
Recently, I found this quote from U.S. author and activist Mariame Kaba that epitomised our fight to protect and restore your Park Lands:
“Our actions are working, and they are not enough. Nothing we do is sufficient, and everything we do matters. We must be strategic, and we must operate on multiple fronts simultaneously. Time is of the essence, and we have to act for the long haul. This is how change happens.”
Mariame Kaba
The Adelaide Park Lands Association has a four-pronged strategy: Explore, Inspire, Protect and Restore.
Each one of our stories, articles or social media posts, each one of our Trail Guides or Guided Walks, each “inspiring” #adelaideparklands #picoftheday; each entry to the Adelaide Park Lands Art Prize and every other action in support of your Park Lands can be likened to a single drop of water, added to a fast-flowing river, or stream of information or influence.
All of these efforts are helping to turn public opinion in favour of your Park Lands. As Mariame Kaba would say, everything that we do is necessary, but nevertheless all these things are insufficient. Everything that we do matters, and these actions are working, but they are not enough.
On Wednesday 10 January I took the following photos that show why what we are doing is insufficient. The photos below show that the State Government, at three separate Park Lands locations, is treating your Park Lands as merely vacant building allotments.
Read more about this site, for the New Women’s and Children’s Hospital on your Park Lands.
Read more about the Botanic High School expansion in your Park 11.
Images such as those above might leave some Park Lands supporters despondent.
But not me. They encourage me to hope, not passively, but actively.
Again, Mariame Kaba has something to say on the subject of ACTIVE hope:
“When I would feel overwhelmed by what was going on … I would just say to myself: ‘Hope is a discipline.’ It’s less about ‘how you feel,’ and more about the practice of making a decision every day, that you’re still gonna put one foot in front of the other…
“It’s work to be hopeful. It’s not a fuzzy feeling. You have to actually put in energy, time, and you have to be clear-eyed, and you have to hold fast to having a vision. It’s a hard thing to maintain. But it matters to have it, to believe that it’s possible to change the world.”
Will you help your Park Lands, with some burning, active hope? Don’t just nod. Do something. Make a choice from one of the volunteer roles here: www.adelaide-parklands.asn.au/volunteer
Image: Shutterstock