Arapiles Climbing Bans: Time For A Genuine Collaboration

In early November at 5.12PM, the day before both the 2024 Melbourne Cup (and its associated public holiday) and the US election, Parks Victoria (PV) released its draft amended Management Plan for Mt Arapiles/Dyurrite in western Victoria.

It soon became clear why PV had tried to bury the news: The new plan shuts rockclimbers and bushwalkers out of most of the park, banning 63 per cent of the available climbing routes and all off-track walking. This management plan follows a similar one released in 2021 for the nearby Grampians/Gariwerd National Park, which shut down 80 per cent of the rockclimbing, and locked climbers and bushwalkers out of large swathes of the park by banning off-track walking. If this new Dyurrite Management Plan comes into effect without any changes, it will mean that the vast majority of quality climbing is now forbidden in Victoria.

If you are not familiar with it, Mt Arapiles—or Dyurrite as the local Wotjobaluk Nations call it—is an ancient outcrop of quartzite-rich sandstone rising from a vast horizon of paddocks in the Wimmera (about a 50-minute drive further west of Gariwerd). It’s only a small state park, but it is an ark of natural bushland packed with flora and fauna, surrounded by broadacre cropping and sheep farming. It is home to cultural-heritage sites of deep significance to the Wotjobaluk, Jaadwa, Jadawadjali, Wergaia and Jupagulk People of the Wotjobaluk Nations, whose interests are represented by the Barengi Gadjin Land Council (BGLC).

Dyurrite is also one of the best rockclimbing areas in the world. Since the mid-1960s, many thousands of people have learnt traditional climbing there, a particularly low-impact form of climbing where people use the natural features of the rock to protect their ascents. The park is of little interest to most other visitors as it only has a couple of very short walks. Most non-climbing tourists will either stop for a picnic or drive to the summit and walk the 70m up to the steel and concrete lookout, never to return. But Dyurrite is so popular with climbers that nine out of ten of the park’s estimated annual 50,000 visits are climbers, and they return, weekend after weekend, year after year. The nearby town of Natimuk (population 500) relies on climbing tourism and is thriving while many small regional towns are slowly dying. Many climbers love the place so much they’ve bought houses in Natimuk (and nearby Horsham) and now live and work in the area, bringing much needed skills to the Wimmera, particularly in healthcare. (Ed: Wild’s founding editor Chris Baxter was one of the first climbers to buy a house here, back in the 1980s for $5,000 on his credit card.)

In the wake of the proposed bans, PV has not provided evidence of how climbers have damaged the cultural or natural values of the park, beyond offering general statements. While climbers do not deny we have impacts, we believe they are manageable without blanket bans. Climbers have also been good stewards of Dyurrite. In collaboration with PV, through organisations such as Friends of Arapiles, the Victorian Climbing Club’s Crag Care and, more recently, Crag Stewards, climbers have spent thousands of hours on working bees that have contributed to weeding, removing feral species, building tracks to avoid erosion, and growing and planting endemic species. When there are bushfires, it is climbers (who form the majority of active members of the Natimuk CFA) who are the first to respond. Climbers have also helped protect cultural heritage. For instance, in 1992, Andrew Long, a climber and archaeologist, noticed an extensive stone quarry (the majority of cultural-heritage sites in the park are quarries) at one of Dyurrite’s most popular climbing sites; climbers then assisted archaeologists to catalogue and protect the site. Notably, despite three decades of climbing nearby, the site was undamaged. And there are many more examples of climbers highlighting and working to protect cultural-heritage sites.

But why are bans being imposed? The new Dyurrite and Gariwerd Management Plans reflect a broader transformation in how parks are being managed in Victoria. As part of the response to the profound damage and loss First Nations people have suffered from colonisation, PV is now moving to a model where they manage parks in collaboration with Traditional Owner groups, with a focus on protecting Aboriginal cultural heritage.

The Wotjobaluk Nations are the recognised Traditional Owners of Dyurrite, meaning BGLC is now the joint manager of the park. PV and BGLC have proposed the implementation of climbing bans ostensibly to protect the cultural and environmental values of the park. Unfortunately, these values and the way they have been decided are a black box, because the process of producing the plan was done in secrecy (often cultural heritage is necessarily kept secret to protect it) and without consultation with any other stakeholders, including the council, climbers, businesses and the local community. The ‘consultation’ phase released on 4 November, 2024 initially allowed for less than a month for feedback, and explicitly stated that the consultation would have no effect on the final plan—it would simply be a box-ticking exercise.

Needless to say, the response from climbers and the local community has been a mix of outrage at the extent of the bans, and also disappointment at being left out of the engagement process. Climbers are not arguing that cultural heritage or the natural values of the park shouldn’t be protected, but we believe these values and climbing can coexist if the stakeholders collaborate to create a management plan that is more granular rather than relying on blanket bans. In terms of creating a successful management plan for the future of Dyurrite, so far PV’s stakeholder-engagement efforts have been, according to the experts I have spoken to, a case study in how not to do it.

The irony may be that by failing to run an evidence-based, open and transparent engagement process to reassure people that the closures are proportional to the risks that recreational access poses to cultural and natural values, in the longer term PV may damage its social licence, and in the process erode support for the protections that state and national parks offer. Indeed, PV is already riven with problems, the major one being a lack of funding. At a time when our parks are facing massive challenges from climate change to invasive species, PV is managing 18 per cent of the state on just 0.37 per cent of the annual state budget (2020-21 figures). It’s questionable whether PV actually has the capacity to manage the stakeholder engagement required to create a successful management plan.

Other states understand that the process of creating a successful management plan is more complex than simply banning people from the landscape without consultation. In NSW, the Department of Environment, Climate Change and Water’s (DECCW) Cultural Landscapes: A practical guide for park management, offers a more holistic approach that recognises the importance of bringing stakeholders along:

Applying a cultural landscapes approach is not just about meeting DECCW’s legislative, policy and ethical obligations or even about doing the right thing. There is a much greater imperative, because a major challenge for DECCW in achieving a goal of ‘integrated landscape management for long-term ecological, social and economic sustainability’ is ensuring long-term community support for conservation and for our park system. Knowing that all landscapes contain the imprint of human use means that there will be communities who have connections to most, if not all, of the NSW landscape. Recognising and respecting each community’s special places and landscapes within the NSW park system, which lies at the core of culture and heritage management practice, provides a powerful basis for engaging communities in the conservation of our park landscapes.

The 2018 Parks Victoria Act itself states that PV must engage with the wider community and key stakeholders when producing management plans. Instead, PV has opted for a divisive approach that keeps Traditional Owners and other stakeholders separate. Rather than build relationships and foster collaboration to create a sense that everyone is working together for the benefit of our parks and the people who love them, PV is adding to the growing feeling of the Victorian public that they are being ‘locked out’ of parks. This backlash in the long term may lead to negative outcomes for our parks, and has been hijacked by some members of the political right who possess an anti-conservation agenda to capitalise on this sense of exclusion. Certainly, there is a growing resistance in rural communities to new park proposals such as the Great Forest and Wombat–Lerderderg National Parks.

Perhaps one sign of the backlash is that climbers’ recent activism has elicited a response from the state government in comparison to our efforts after the Gariwerd bans. By the end of November, the Victorian Environment Minister, Steve Dimopoulos, had sacked the CEO of Parks Victoria, Matthew Jackson (or, to be exact, they came to a ‘mutual agreement’ for him to leave). At the same time, the non-consultation ‘consultation’ period was extended until February 2025, and a review of Parks Victoria has been promised by March 2025 to ensure that PV is “meeting community expectations”. More recently, PV announced that a steering committee was being established to consult on the Dyurrite Management Plan that would include climbers and other members of the local community.

Beyond the Dyurrite Management Plan’s failure of process, PV’s current approach to managing parks raises broader questions about our parks and peoples’ place in them. Are parks more like museums where people visit within the constraints of authorised (and often commercialised) tourist trails, or are they places where people can seek connection in a variety of low-impact ways? Do we seek to have no human impact on wild places, or do we accept that humans have always been part of the landscape and, as such, that certain impacts are inevitable? Also missing from PV’s current focus is the question of what is the human cost of denying people access to wild places? And what is the cost to the environment in the longer term? As a former editor of this magazine, I always agonised about telling stories about sensitive places, but I generally felt that encouraging a connection with the land meant that people would be more likely to stand up and protect wild places.

Whatever our history, many of us have a deep need to spend time in nature in a way that’s meaningful for us. We only have limited parklands, but if we have the spirit to share them in a way that touches lightly on the land and builds connection and care, then that seems a better way to move forward. Making that work within the confines of the law, bureaucracy and politics is obviously complicated, but certainly the vast majority of climbers are willing to listen, learn and work together with PV, Traditional Owners and other stakeholders if a genuine opportunity for collaboration is offered.

Postscript: As we go to print, Parks Victoria released a cache of new documents, including a decision matrix stating that “All public access and use rights in the Dyurrite Cultural Landscape should be understood as temporary, and that changes to these in future is a possibility,” which appears to be in direct contradiction to the Environment Minister Steve Dimopoulos’ reassurance that the Dyurrite Cultural Landscape would “continue to be a place for climbing, walks and camping, as well as many other activities…”

Over the decades, Wild has run loads of content on Arapiles/Dyurrite, including this classic cover from 1986 of Stefan Glowacz soloing Kachoong (21). The most recent Arapiles-related features we’ve run were a profile on Arapiles’ ‘Golden Years’ in Issue #182 and a profile on pioneering Arapiles’ climber Louise Shepherd in Issue #192.

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