Pooh Bear’s Corner is a small haven in dense bush, and a new study has identified another layer of meaning for the site. Photos: Michelle Kroll.
Any drive along the beauty of the Clyde Mountain will see motorists pass by a special landmark.
Since the 1970s, a cave on the Kings Highway has been home to Pooh Bear’s Corner, where people stop to see the collection of teddy bears and other soft toys – or even leave one themselves.
Australian National University’s Dr Toni Eagar grew up on the coast, and says it is maintained by human hands for various reasons.
In a recent paper, she and co-author Shona Bettany from the University of Huddersfield looked at the site as a ”traversing shrine”.
According to their paper, Pooh Bear’s Corner is an example of the phenomenon whereby people pause on their journey and behave in a particular way.
“These are usually in the middle of nowhere for some opaque purpose … [and are] something that you do so other tourists can see that you’ve done it,” Dr Eagar says.
She says Pooh Bear’s Corner has become part of local lore in south-eastern Australia.
“Growing up, we tend to just look out for it – it seems to me a lot of the people coming from the west down to the coast would pause and leave teddy bears.
“Some people just consider it to be nice and don’t know much about it.
“For some people, particularly when we start looking at intergenerational stuff, it seems to mean a lot about childhood, family holidays and a warm, fuzzy feeling of nostalgia.”
Dr Eagar says she was inspired to look at Pooh Bear’s Corner about six years ago, when she was looking at ”love locks” in Paris. (In the phenomenon, loved-up couples attach a padlock to a bridge and throw away the keys to prove their love will last forever.)
“Love locks have this really well-known ritual and mythology,” she says.
“Everyone knows what you’re supposed to do and why you’re doing it, as opposed to Pooh Bear’s Corner, where no one knows who’s doing it, no one knows why.”
Over the years, Pooh Bear’s Corner has become part of local tradition.
To examine how people interacted with the mountainside site, Dr Eagar interviewed people about their involvement with Pooh Bear’s Corner and took photos of how it changed over time.
“There were some people who saw leaving the teddy bear as something they planned – and was a very big ritual – as opposed to something they did because they saw them there.
“Some people just did it because they thought it was something nice, whereas others thought if you don’t leave your teddy bear, your holiday is going to suck.”
The researchers found that in addition to leaving items, travellers used the site to orient themselves on their journeys or were inspired to tell stories about Pooh or fairies to their children.
Others contributed by installing (and repairing) signs to mark the site.
“It’s not the easiest place to try and install a sign – transporting all the things that you would need to install a sign is this whole process,” Dr Eagar says.
There are similar installations in other places – such as the nearby horde of rocking horses seen making their home near the foot of the Clyde in recent times – where people leave something behind as they pass through.
“It seems to be some sort of collective effort by tourists to leave stuff behind [and do that] in certain places, in certain ways,” Dr Eagar says.
“There’s this element of sacrifice that is involved … people have to decide whether they’re willing to give up stuff.”
For the researchers, the sites are not only somewhere people pass on their way to somewhere else, but a place they engage with and give a special kind of meaning to.
“The conclusion we drew was [about its importance because] no one lives there,” Dr Eagar says of Pooh Bear’s Corner.
“It involves people from both sides of the mountain sharing stories. It’s this shared sense of localness.
“You’re a local to the area – not just local to Canberra, but to the coast.”
The paper is available in the Annals of Tourism Research journal.
