Australia's first Arbor Day celebrated in Adelaide parklands in 1889 after big parade from Victoria Square
A crowd (with a policeman in shako cap of the era, at left) watching a mass tree planting by Adelaide state schoolboys at the southern end of the Victoria Park racecourse in the city parklands on the first Arbor Day in 1889. Top right: About 300 pupils from Parkside, Glen Osmond and Highgate schools carry on the tradition in 1923 at the old horse tram sheds, corner of Fullarton and Campbell roads, Parkside South.
Images courtesy State Library of South Australia
Australia’s first Arbor Day was in Adelaide city’s south parklands on June 20, 1889, following the concept was started in Nebraska in the United States of America in 1872.
The South Australian Register of June 20, 1889, described how the first Arbor Day would be arranged:
“The Adelaide children start with a great flourish of trumpets from Victoria square. Each school will be preceded by its band. The singers go before. The planters – who are to be decorated with rosettes – follow after. When the procession arrives on the ground, the elect children, who are to plant trees, will be separated from their less favoured brethren. The schools will be divided into squads — the planting squad and the non-planting squad. The planting squad is to be arranged with due care — one child to each hole. it may be hoped that a certain amount of fitness will be observed, and that every square hole will command the attendance of a square child. When the word is given, the trees will be planted, a great celebration will be over, and the children of the schools will have received a lesson on the value of arboriculture.”
After the parade of 5,000 Adelaide schoolchildren and officials from Victoria Square to the Adelaide parklands, South Australian governor Lord Kintore and his wife planted a bunya bunya (araucaria bidwillii) and a weeping Scotch elm (ulmus pendula) in the parklands. Groups of pupils planted 757 seedlings in other designated parklands areas.
Similar events followed around South Australia and the annual Arbor Day event, together with Wattle Day, was linked with nationalistic feeling.
In 1870, and again in 1873, South Australia’s surveyor general George Goyder had warned about to rapid decrease in South Australia’s native forests and recommended forest reserves. He was supported by Friedrich Krichauff, a prominent advocate of scientific agriculture and forestry, and the first German-born South Australian elected to the colony’s House of Assembly.
Krichauff also was instrumental in promoting the start of Arbor Day in Adelaide. Support came from others including parliamentarian John Cockburn and bureau of agriculture secretary Albert Molineux. The concept was developed by John Ednie Brown, the South Australian government’s conservator of forests, who had studied trees and forests in the United States of America in the early 1870s.
While the Arbor Day tradition in South Australia didn’t survive in the 20th Century, 100 trees were planted at an Arbor Day centenary ceremony on June 20, 1989, centenary near the original Adelaide parklands site.