12 of 12, January 2016

Once every month the 12th comes around; once every three years the Australian Scout Jamboree comes around. I’ll give a bit more detail about my whole Jamboree experience in the next blog entry, but for now here is an account in 12 photos of the activities of the 12th.

It began fairly early; most mornings I was up before 6am to help with breakfast preparations, necessitating a departure from the comfort of the mattress and sleeping bag. A few nights before this one (I think) I had my 365th night in a tent on Scouting events, which was a milestone I celebrated with chocolate cheesecake a couple of days later; by the end of the Jamboree I was well into my second year!

This is our campsite: there are seven six-man tents, two smaller domes, two gazebos for cooking and washing up, an 18’x12′ auto tent being used as a QM-store (behind the photographer) and a long dining shelter (the yellow roof in the background behind the gazebos), all crammed onto a 20m x 30m house block. The ditches running across the open area were constructed in haste earlier in the Jamboree when we had over 70mm (3″) of rain in 3 days.

Breakfast preparations were fairly demanding, since catering for 37 (5 adults and 32 Scouts) requires a lot of food and cooking space.

We managed to get through breakfast in enough time to be able to take some group photos underneath the gateway that we had painted at our pre-Jamboree camp. The first photo shows the whole troop, wearing our distinctive but lairy (=brash and bright) Tasmanian contingent shirts; the second photo is of the five leaders for the troop in various manic poses (depending on the levels of energy they could muster!).

After the photos the kids headed off to their activities for the day; on this particular day I was rostered to hang around our campsite. I spent some time cleaning off the barbecue (so that it was ready to be dirtied again at dinner time!).

I enjoyed the peace and quiet of an empty dining shelter (at meal times there’d be 5 to 7 people at each table, and lots of excited chatter). The shade wasn’t as useful a respite from the sun as we might have hoped as the vinyl roof trapped the heat and there wasn’t much airflow, and so during the day it was often better to sit in the smaller but more open shade of one of the gazebos.

Some of my clothes needed washing and so the morning quiet was a good opportunity to go through the laborious process of washing and rinsing.

It’s a bit hard to give you a sense of the whole Jamboree site, but there were about 8000 Scouts and 3000 leaders in attendance, camping on about 240 campsites like ours; every day about half of them would go off-site to various activities further afield while the remaining half stayed on-site doing challenges, making stuff, learning new skills, and so on.

Feeding so many people requires a good supply chain, and each day the duty patrol and one of the leaders would do a run to our local Q-store for our food.

The only hassle with this was that the Q-store was 500m or so from our troop site, necessitating a long haul all the way back (and if I remember rightly some of the cartons started disintegrating on this particular trip).

And in the evening it was the birthday of one of the girls in our troop, which meant birthday cake as an addition to our regular rations!

(The “12 of 12” project involves taking 12 photos on the 12th of the month. This provides the opportunity to get snapshots of different aspects of your life. I have been doing this since 2009.)