Where The Outdoors Can Take Them – Jennifer Oaten
A day in the bush is so good for the soul. I grew up in Margaret River and loved the outdoors, and still do. The outdoors was not a weekend activity. It was just where you went. You worked things out, got things wrong, and figured it out without anyone watching. I did not think of it as anything significant at the time. Looking back, it was shaping me.
That is what I find myself thinking about as our Year 7 students spent time at Nanga Bush Camp in Dwellingup this week.
I was privileged to spend the day with our campers. After cooking a simple pasta meal on a trangia, one student said to me, ‘I didn’t realise how much effort goes into making dinner’. Another student said, ‘I didn’t get to the top of the climbing wall, but I got much further than I thought I could.’ These are just two reasons why the outdoors is important.
Most of our girls are growing up in a world that is increasingly managed. Schedules are full, risks are minimised, and screens fill the gaps that unstructured time used to occupy. I do not say this as a criticism of families. I say it because I think it matters, and because I think we are beginning to see what it costs.
What a managed life can quietly take away
There is a particular kind of confidence that does not come from being told you are capable. It comes from discovering it yourself, in a situation where no one could have predicted the outcome. That discovery is becoming harder to engineer in ordinary suburban life.
A child who has never navigated genuine discomfort, who has always had an adult available to smooth the edges, can reach adolescence without ever having found out what she is capable of on her own. That is not a criticism. It is simply what happens when we work too hard to protect our children from difficulty.
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame Australia studied outdoor adventure programs in Western Australian independent schools and found that what built the most in young people was not the activities themselves. It was the social connections formed under pressure, the time in natural settings, and the experience of doing something real with genuine consequences. A 2025 Australian study specifically tracking adolescent girls found measurable improvements in resilience and sense of belonging after outdoor programs, with school belonging scores exceeding Australia-wide averages for the same age group. Time in natural settings, doing something real, builds things in young people that a classroom cannot easily replicate.
What we see at camp
We send our Year 6, Year 7 and Year 9 students to camp, and the progression is deliberate. Each experience builds on the last. What I hear from staff when the girls return is not primarily about the activities. It is about what happened between the activities.
The girl who barely spoke in the first hour was leading her group by the second day. The friendship that did not exist before the camp was clearly something real by the time the bus pulled back into school. The student who came back and said, quietly, that she had not known she could do that.
These things do not happen in a managed environment. They happen when you take young people somewhere unfamiliar, give them something genuinely hard to do, and trust them to find their way through it.
What you can do with the holidays ahead
If your daughter has just come back from camp, the conversation worth having is not about the highlights. It is about what was hard and how she got through it. Those are the moments worth sitting with, and often the ones she most needs to make sense of out loud.
With the school holidays approaching, I want to encourage families to think about how much unstructured time outdoors they can offer their daughters over the break. Not organised activities. Just genuine time outside, away from screens, with space to be bored and then find something to do.
That is not a small thing for an adolescent girl. The research on young people and time in natural settings is consistent: it gives girls back something that a busy term tends to take away.
For girls who come back from Nanga wanting more of what they found there, Outdoor Education is available at Santa Maria as an elective from Year 9. I hear from the staff who teach it about students abseiling for the first time, learning to read a river, surfing, canoeing and navigating bush country, coming back from expeditions changed in ways that are hard to name. It is a subject I am proud of.
I am increasingly convinced that in a world that works hard to protect our girls from difficulty, the most important thing we can offer them is the chance to discover what they are capable of when things are genuinely hard. Camp is one of the ways we do that. I hope it is not the only one.
What experiences have shaped your daughter most? I suspect the comfortable ones are not at the top of the list.
- belonging at school, Featured, girls bush camp, Girls' Education Perth, outdoor education for girls, outdoor learning, resilience in adolescent girls, Santa Maria College, school camp experiences, Student Wellbeing, Year 7 Camp
Author: Santa Maria College
Santa Maria College is a vibrant girls school with a growing local presence and reputation. Our Mission is to educate young Mercy women who act with courage and compassion to enrich our world. Santa Maria College is located in Attadale in Western Australia, 16 km from the Perth CBD. We offer a Catholic education for girls in Years 5 – 12 and have 1300 students, including 152 boarders.
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