It is the 41st time the dinner has been held in the Bega Valley, taking place on Tuesday, June 5, and featured Helen Smith who has a PhD in wildlife ecology.

After she was involved in an accident three years ago she began to look at options for people in a wheelchair to experience the outdoors.

The longest walk she could find was only 2km long and she said often it can take longer to get out of the car and assemble the chair then it does to do the walk.  

Traditionally, wheelchair accessible defined walks in nature are well-curated, often have large barricades around them making it difficult to see the surroundings, are flat, dispersed across NSW and usually quite short. 

Due to this, the walks do not provide the opportunity for Dr Smith to experience nature the way she wants. 

“It’s bizarre such a intuitively healing process is basically being denied to a whole group of people,” she said.  

“It’s not just people in wheelchairs that I’m talking about, this is so much broader than that.

“It’s thinking about parents that have prams, it’s talking about older people that maybe have arthritis.” 

She disagreed with parts of the Australian walking track grading system’s definition of a wheelchair accessible walk, for instance saying in the NSW bushland there were tracks that could still be accessed by wheelchairs that were longer than the system’s 5km limit. 

As a response to these issues Dr Smith has been working on the Naturally Accessible Program with the National Parks Association of NSW, which aims to improve access to the outdoors by providing people with better information.

Under the program a track’s features such as gradient as well as height and number of steps can be described, with the aim of making information available for people to decide themselves how much of a path they can access. 

The system does not rely on equipment, so it cannot be outdated as technology for equipment improves, and the program has produced a manual to help land managers describe their land to visitors.  

“I want to get to a point where it is not unusual to see a person with a wheelchair go bushwalking,” Dr Smith said.