adventure playgrounds

On the evocatively named Neptune Street in St. Kilda, whose access is by way of a labyrinth of tiny one way streets, there's an adventure waiting to happen. The St Kilda Adventure Playground. Trampolines, halfpipe, flying fox, treehouse, pirate ship and a spiral slide...the whole kaleidiscopic array of mayhem is as anti-PC as you can get. And it is so exciting.

In a world where children are wrapped in cotton wool and their tiny muffled voices can scarcely be heard over the noise of the blades from their helicopter parents, this is an assail to the senses, a portal to creative and imaginative play. There is the potential for broken bones and cuts and grazes. But the richness of possibilities, discovery and learning about limits, without the limits being imposed in a sterile and overly protective way is particularly apparent here.

I take adventure playgrounds for granted. But then, I am a child of, well, let's face it and own up to it, the seventies and eighties. We had adventure playgrounds. We also had whole continents and galaxies over the back fence in the 'back paddock', a high-grassed expanse of an empty section where all manner of adventures took place, and whose existence and exploitation by neighbourhood children seems rare in this day and age. We are all too precious or afraid nowadays for back paddocks and flying foxes.

The term, adventure playground, is a product of the Danish 1940s. A Danish landscape architect, noticed that children preferred to play everywhere but in the playgrounds that he built. Children preferred the chaos of a junkyard to his carefully imagined structures and lines. In 1931, he imagined "A junk playground in which children could create and shape, dream and imagine a reality." His initial ideas started the adventure playground movement.

It is tempting to eliminate all chance of pain, getting hurt, for things not turning out the way we imagined they would, for perhaps having to seek out a band aid or even wear a cast for a few weeks. And then there are the giddy heights of being thrilled, of feeling as though the possibilities are endless, of just bouncing as much and as high as you can for three minutes before the next person in line starts losing it, overwhelmed as they are with the anticipation of bouncing. There is the wind in your face as the flying fox lurches down its trajectory path and the view out over the roofs from the top of the fort to the horizon.

Adventure playgrounds. Fraught with peril. But so worth it.