by Shane Sody

An eight-year labour of love has been completed.

Your Adelaide Park Lands finally have a complete guide, with every part of your garland of Parks now covered by its own thoroughly researched and illustrated walking guide.

Our Trail Guides are a resource for you (or anyone in the world) to learn about, and EXPLORE; walking through any part of your Park Lands, while discovering its present and past features; its place in Adelaide’s social history, landscaping, vegetation and much more.

Our full collection of 29 Trail Guides serves an additional purpose; providing background for our Park Ambassadors to rely upon as they take you on our regular Guided Walks through each part of your Park Lands.

Our first Trail Guide was published in 2016. The final one, to complete the set (published in July 2024) was a Guide to the south-west Park Lands off Anzac Highway.

See the full collection of Adelaide Park Lands Association Trail Guides here: www.adelaide-parklands.asn.au/trailguides

Here are links to just a few:

Each Trail Guide takes 90 minutes to two hours, to complete a circuit within a selected part of your Park Lands, stopping at a dozen or more places of interest along the way.

If you have friends or relatives visiting Adelaide, just pick a day with good weather, and introduce them to a slice of your Adelaide Park Lands, and impress them with knowledge of your chosen Park!

These Trail Guides are not static. Each one is reviewed at least annually, and kept up to date with news from our bi-monthly newsletter, and assistance from each one of our Park Ambassadors.

If you’d like to be part of this team, please contact us: secretary@adelaide-parklands.asn.au

Background

The project commenced in 2016 with what was the first of our many Trail Guides to your Adelaide Park Lands.

At that time, we started with a Guide to Lefevre Park / Nantu Wama (Park 6) believing that the presence of horses in that Park would entice our readers to learn about them, and the other features of that Park.

In following years, the time-consuming project to describe and illustrate each part of your Park Lands and their history benefited from two grants that we received.

In 2017, the Federal Government’s Department of the Environment and Energy approved a grant under its former “Community Heritage and Icons Grants” scheme, for researching and writing Trail Guides for what was, at the time, proposed to be just an initial five Parks within your Park Lands. These first Guides were also produced as audio files.

At that time, the National Trust assisted us by publishing the early Trail Guides on its former “Adelaide City Explorer” app and website, before we transitioned in 2021 to hosting all of the content on this, our own website.

Later, in 2023, one of our insurers, Community Underwriting, provided grant funding to print thousands of copies of Trail Guide leaflets that we give out on each of our Guided Walks.

We also have distributed some of these leaflets at cafes and other venues in or near the City. If you have a public-facing office, please enquire about putting some of these leaflets on your counter.

There are 29 different leaflets; each corresponding to a Trail Guide that covers each respective section of your Park Lands.

The author of this article, Shane Sody, is the President of the Adelaide Park Lands Association and the editor of the semi-monthly newsletter, "Open Green Public".

Subscribe here.

https://adelaideparklands.m-pages.com/YWRrGW/adelaide-park-lands-assn-mailing