By Dongyun Kwon
A Steels Creek resident was honoured for all her efforts for Australian orienteering development and devotion to the Steels Creek community.
The OAM was awarded to Mrs Peta Whitford who lives in Steels Creek on Australia Day.
Mrs Whitford said she was overwhelmed because she didn’t know she was nominated for it until receiving an official email.
“My husband started the nomination about two and a half years ago, getting things together and I knew nothing about it,” she said.
“I don’t think I’ve done things to get this medal but it’s really nice to be acknowledged.”
Mrs Whitford is a living legend of Australian orienteering history.
She participated in the Orienteering World Championship five times in four different roles; three times as a participant of the Australian team in 1974, 1976 and 1978, once as a captain of the Australian team in 1978, once as a deputy technical coordinator in 1985 and once as a head coach in 1993.
Mrs Whitford said she took the opportunities when she and her husband went overseas to study.
“Soon after orienteering started in Australia, I went along with some friends to an event and I really enjoyed it because I like going out in the bush and I like running,” she said.
“My husband and I went on a study to the UK and the USA for nearly two years, working in outdoor education and during that time, I was able to go along with some of the instructors at some of the places where we worked and they were brushing up on their navigation skills and doing a local orienteering club.
“I went over to Switzerland in the summertime for a multi-day event with them.”
In the event, Mrs Whitford met a man who was just employed as a coach for the Australian orienteering team that they were trying to put together for the first time to go overseas, and he was impressed by her progress.
“I received official notification and had to travel from America through to Denmark, to join the other Australians and went into my first World Championships, which was a huge step to take,” Mrs Whitford said.
“That was the start of going to a number of World Championships and then eventually, through my interest in coaching as an international coach of orienteering, I coached the Australian team.”
For her abundant experiences with different positions, she could help the Australian orienteering community to grow locally and internationally.
“I also helped organise our World Championships that Australia had been credited with and I was one of the people who worked in the field, doing a lot of background work on running courses to see that they were suitable in terrain, so I played quite a big role in the background for Australia to be able to put on the World Championships to the right standard,” Mrs Whitford said.
“I then started developing some of the coaching syllabuses in Australia. We had level one, level two and an international level and I obviously went through those myself.”
Mrs Whitford did a degree in physical education at Bedford in the UK and went overseas again to study outdoor education with her husband, who’s also a physical education teacher after she married him.
Mrs Whitford said her experience in physical education helped her get into orienteering well.
“When I was training to be a physical education teacher, I was taught to be very organised and it just suited this sport [orienteering] because as a competitor, I had to plan my route and execute it even when people weren’t watching me in the forest,” she said.
“My makeup of me as a person, and I chose the right profession and it’s led me on to really spending a lifetime helping to build orienteering here in Victoria and Australia.”
Mrs Whitford took the position of state coordinator from 1990 to 2003, became a life member in 1993, was a development officer and was also a founder of Mountain Bike Orienteering for Schools in 2004 for Orienteering Victoria.
In Yarra Valley Orienteering Club, she became a member in 1975 and a life member in 1988.
She was also a coach and the president of the club.
Along with her passion for orienteering, Mrs Whitford also had a big passion for her local community.
She was a vice president of Steels Creek Landcare Group and has done some projects for the local environment.
One of the major projects was a deer management project, aimed to solve the problem of damaging tree plantings and crops caused by deer.
“I had contacts with the local rangers through my outdoor education work, so I was able to easily contact them, ring them up and invite them down here, run through what the government was doing to support the problem of deer,” Mrs Whitford said.
“Then, they worked on public lands and we worked on private lands.”
Mrs Whitford said they had to carry out the project to protect the vegetation in the area, although it was a little bit controversial and some people didn’t want to do it.
“If you see the damage of the trees and the landscape firsthand, you’ll say we shouldn’t have these animals in our forest,” she said.
“They really damaged the vegetation in the creeks, they loved scratching at the bark of trees and they just loved getting the lovely juicy leaves at the top when the saplings were growing and they put their hind legs up and all the saplings were smashed down.
“We needed to have some program to improve the health of the dam; trying to get the environment working in its best way.”
Another thing that she contributed to Steels Creek was The Jolly Thing, which is a community newsletter published every two months by Steels Creek Community Centre.
Mrs Whitford took advantage of her orienteering experience and wrote GET OUT THERE!, which introduced the local environment and nearby places.
“When I retired from my professional work, I’d had a few people say to me, ‘We can walk around here, we live in a rural area. Yes, there are lots of things online, but sometimes the walks are too long or they get out of this area.’,” she said.
“I thought okay, I’ll foster a couple of my friends around here who’d like walking as well and we’ll go and sort out some walks and I’ll take notes and photographs and write up some of these walks and then presented as an A4 page and I’ll draw the map that goes with it so that people know where they could start or any restrictions on the area like ‘no dogs’, ‘no horses’.
“So I would tie everything and put a distance in and tell people what they needed to take and it’s a really good way to get the feel of this beautiful valley up here, which has so much to offer.”
Mrs Whitford was also one of the contributors to the Steels Creek Exchange Hub.
Steels Creek Exchange Hub is a place where people can exchange goods, chatter and local information, as well as enjoy the good company of fellow valley residents held every second and fourth Saturday of each month.
“We have a little market going through many years and it actually looked like it had just been swallowed up, people were busy doing other things,” Mrs Whitford said
“So, as a small group of a dozen local people, we said ‘Can we come up with another name?’, maybe it’s not really a market where people can drop in and find 10, 15 or 20 different tables of stuff, we might only have four tables of stuff.
“It’s more of an exchange, so we renamed it Exchange Hub. We’re going to start it in a couple of weeks, we are taking a break over the Christmas time because people are away.”
Mrs Whitford said she is also an active member of the Exchange Hub.
“I’m renowned for my rhubarb. I grow rhubarb up here and I pick it the night before and bundle it up and take it up there,” she said.
