User:Winklepick25/sandbox

"Hanging on to rocks I feel like i am hanging onto a friend, If I see a rock I dont trust . I keep away from it . The same as you wouldn't get to matey with a friend you wouldn't trust"

Known as the barefoot bushwalker Dot Butler was renowned for bushwalking and climbing with bare feet. Born in 1911, Dorothy Butler was the fourth of five children of Isadora (Goff) and Frank Alfred English, a traveling salesman in pharmaceutical products who was seldom home and had disappeared by the time Dorothy was eleven. He taught his young children the Greek alphabet, and considered Dorothy to be the best of the brood. Their mother developed their love of literature and poetry. The children were encouraged them to fend for themselves and solve their own problems.

Dot Butler joined the Sydney Bushwalkers Club, finding in bushwalking the adventure she had known as a child, trailing barefoot through the bush with her brothers. Dot became one of the Tiger walkers, who walked long distances at speed in the largely untracked and unmapped Blue Mountains. Carrying a daypack made from a pillowcase, she became legendary as the Barefoot Bushwalker.

The club was founded in 1927. Among its aims was the formation of an institution of mutual aid for recreational walkers in regard to routes and ways and means of appreciating the great outdoors. It also aimed to encourage a regard for the welfare and preservation of the natural environment. The club held regular meetings and its activities included organised bush walks, annual reunions, publication of 'The Sydney Bushwalker', as well as social functions and concerts.

In 1936, with Dr Eric Dark, she made the first ascent of Crater Bluff in the Warrumbungle National Park. During World War 2, after accepting a proposal from fellow bushwalker Ira Butler, Dorothy was unable to get a seat on an interstate train from Melbourne to Sydney for the wedding. So she cycled all the way.

Dorothy climbed in the Himalayas and the Alps, canoed 640 km down the Yukon River in Canada, and cycled through  Ireland, Spain and Cambodia. She climbed over the arch of the Sydney Harbour Bridge – as a member of the ‘Night Climbers of Sydney’.

As an early conservationist in the 1930’s she helped set up the Rangers League to develop public awareness and promote protection of native plants, birds and animals, and was involved in setting up Volunteer Bushfire Brigades. She worked for Sydney Bush Walkers’ many conservation projects which resulted in the creation of various Reserves for Public Recreation. She assisted her friend Marie Byles in having Bouddi officially declared a National Park, and worked with the Colong Committee (the oldest National Wilderness Society in Australia) in the Save the Rainforest Campaign and the creation of the Blue Mountains National Park. In her later years she was involved in campaigns to protect Lake Pedder in Tasmania, the Daintree, Kakadu and the Myall Lakes National Park.

In 1988 Dot was awarded Australian Geographic Society’s Gold Medallion for ‘Adventurer of the Year’.

Dorothy continued climbing as she grew older, even though she faced personal tragedy in the death of three of her four children to misadventures in the bush.