Earlier this year the year nines departed on a six-day camp experience to Kalbarri. I believe this camp helped me to create a better understanding of what leadership means. Each night we had to camp in our own tents and each morning we had to take them down again as we moved our way through the beautiful gorges of Kalbarri.
We were given many opportunities on this camp to demonstrate our leadership skills in our many different activities such as cooking, hiking and packing all our food. Our first night was spent at base camp which was located at the Tudor Caravan Park. The main thing on our to-do list that night was to pack all our food for the next six days. This process was very time consuming as all the food had to be packed into different boxes and crates and placed in the trailer. The thing that made this process so much harder was the fact that our camp guides just stood back and watched, leaving us having to take leadership of what we were doing and packing. Being the very first day of camp in a group with people that wouldn’t normally interact with each other no one wanted to step up and take the lead.
We all decided to vote on who we thought should lead; three people were chosen from this process, me being one of them. Within no time I began labelling boxes for our different meals and allocating people to collect the different food groups. Once this process was done and all the different meal boxes for each of the six days were packed, I checked the list one last time to ensure we had successfully collected everything. There were many other situations just like this one where someone had to step up and take leadership or we all had to work collectively as a team, but this moment really stood out for me.