Venturer Scouts challenge themselves at Dragon Skin 2024

With clear skies and warm temperatures, the 2024 edition of Dragon Skin will be remembered as one of the best ever.

This year’s event saw more than 750 Venturer Scouts from every Region in NSW compete alongside teams from the ACT, Queensland and Victoria, all vying to take home the coveted Dragon Skin trophy.

Camp Chief Damien “Dink” Ryan explains below some of the basics of Dragon Skin and who were the big winners this year.

What is Dragon Skin?

Dragon Skin is one of the longest running annual camps in Australia. Working in teams of at least four, the aim of the game is to navigate your way around the forest, completing as many activity bases as possible. Each activity is run by a team of Rover Scouts or Leaders, and tests a different Scouting skill such as first aid, problem-solving and bushcraft.

Teams are scored on activity completion, enthusiasm, planning, and – most importantly – teamwork! Each night, Venturers choose to stay in one of four VOCs (Venturer Overnight Campsites). The VOCs are essentially mini festival sites, with a range of fun activities and dance floors, along with a range of creature comforts.

Facing the challenge

The trails of the Belanglo State Forest provided a stunning backdrop to the near 40 activity bases on offer, each designed to test a different Scouting skill. The top teams came close to completing every activity on offer, requiring them to walk an average of 25km per day. This is a true test of endurance and skill!

Winners are grinners

The winners this year were the “Banana Buddies” of 2nd/3rd Pennant Hills, narrowly beating the aptly named “2nd Place” from 1st Turramurra by only 24 points. The closest result in recent memory!

Base 106 – A Festival of Childhood – was crowned as the best overall activity and VOC 1 as the best-themed VOC.

It takes a lot of effort to win Dragon Skin, but Scott “ScoRo” Romanis and his fellow Venturers from 2nd/3rd Pennant Hills have done it twice! Below, he shares his thoughts on the experience and tips on how to win.

The best part of Dragon Skin is that teams can decide how social or competitive they want to go and are entirely self-driven throughout the weekend. You can go just for the VOCs – party all night long at the discos, try out horizontal bungy, Guitar Hero, ping pong, VOC 4’s Gyroscopic Vomitron and socialise with your mates. Or, you can strive for as many points as possible in an attempt to earn the acclaimed Dragon Skin trophy, skin, banner and medal.

One thing for sure is you must decide at Campbelltown Station if you want to go competitive. There’s no use switching halfway through Saturday because you won’t stand a chance. My team, Team 34 (2023) and Team 35 (2024), decided we were going to try our hardest for a shot at first place. We performed outstandingly well and have now claimed victory for the second year in a row.

My tips and tricks for teams wanting to go competitive are:

• Pack plenty of filling meals! It’s no use tiring yourself out if you can’t have a good meal by the end of the day. You may think dehydrated meals are the way to go, but frozen Bolognese is more filling and tastes so much better
• Try hard, but remember to rest if you need it and have fun. It’s ok to take a break to recharge, otherwise you won’t have any energy for the activity bases
• When you’re at a VOC, there is no competition time until the next day, so make sure to have fun with your mates and take advantage of everything the VOCs have to offer.

I highly recommend Dragon Skin to every Venturer Scout in Australia, no matter what state you’re from. It’s an incredible experience, whether you go for the win or just to have fun and make the most of it.

Events such as Dragon Skin are the result of months, and sometimes years of personal development. Aside from being incredibly fun, everyone – from the youth members to the adult Leaders and supporters – learn life skills and develop themselves. Activities can teach teamwork, problem solving and critical thinking, while organisers can develop project management skills.

These events are a key part of the Scouts Program with a focus on SPICES – the areas of social, physical, intellectual, emotional and spiritual that make up the fundamental basis of a person’s character. Dragon Skin saw Venturer Scouts interact with others (social), be adventurous (physical), be adaptable (intellectual), show autonomy (character), show respect (emotional) and be respectful of others (spiritual).

Michael “Morrie” Thomson saw many of these attributes develop at his activity base, where he also tapped into childhood nostalgia to make it fun.

The Venturer leader for 1st Concord Scout Group dressed up as Upsy Daisy for Base 106 – A Festival of Childhood. He was joined by “Combat Carl” and “The Wiggles” to complete the picture. He shares more below.

Tapping into nostalgia

Three toddler vehicles – Thomas the Tank Engine, The Wiggles’ Big Red Car and Elsa’s Frozen car – all scrounged from council clean-ups, were the stimulus for our Festival of Childhood activity.

Teams “drove” these “remote-controlled” vehicles around one lap of the circuit, then reverse-parked the trailer. Peter Jamieson built two pairs of bridges and tunnels, which teams had to crawl under with their vehicles. Upon completion, each team sang a song appropriately themed for their vehicle – the Thomas theme tune; Toot, Toot, Chugga Chugga, Big Red Car; or Let It Go.

Barbie and Ken dolls, handmade Banans in Pyjamas, plus Miss Piggy and Kermit were the “divorced” stars for “Celebrity Splits”. Teams had to use the speed-dating pulley line to drop each of these onto pictures of their choice of new, compatible partners.

One of the Bananas was invariably paired with Donald Trump – both “being yellow”. Ken was usually matched with Ariana Grande or Elsa (perhaps preferring blondes?), while Kermit was sometimes paired with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Michelangelo – they are both amphibians after all.

“Purr-fect Catastrophe – Dr Seuss’s Incredible Balancing Act” was the most fiendish activity. A playing board with seven ropes enabled teams to pull it close for each of them to add one block at a time, to try to build the tallest tower they could with eight blocks, before balancing the board and tower back on the Cat-in-the-Hat’s hat in the centre of the playing square.

A great base should be challenging, but fun – the difficulty is catering for teams that range from four to seven, ensuring every member can play a role. I feel that our base ticked all those boxes!

The VOC Commanders are in charge of organising and coordinating a great VOC experience for all Venturer Scouts. Below, each of the VOC Commanders a little about what their VOCs had on offer.

VOC 1 (Winner – Best Theme) – Laura Willox

• VOC 1 is made up of mostly Hume and Hunter and Coastal Region Scouts with a large team of Girl Guides
• Our 2024 theme was Festivals
• VOC 1 has the smallest staff team (71 this year), but regularly hit the 60 per cent capacity for Venturers on night one – “VOC 1, Night 1” as the Venturers say. We’re a small VOC, but we work really well as a team and provide an awesome experience for the Venturers
• Base 106 – The Festival of Childhood – was part of VOC 1 and won best base at Dragon Skin this year
• Picking a best night activity would be hard, as we had quite a few this year, but the food trucks giving out fairy floss, popcorn, hot milo and noodles seemed to be a favourite. Also, the Guitar Hero stage and the inflatable gladiator duel or horizontal bungee
• Putting together a VOC takes a lot of preparation and experienced knowledge. We have previous VOC Commanders on our team to help support
• The support from the other VOCs and HQ also go a long way in putting together VOC 1. Everyone is there to help each other and lend a hand!

VOC 2 – Jack Temisgian

• VOC 2 is mainly made up of Rover Scouts and Venturer Leaders from Sydney North Region
• Our theme this year was VOCtiki. A play on words with Contiki with the VOC and bases incorporating themes from a world trip
• We had 120 Leaders on VOC 2 this year with seven activities bases
• We had about 110 teams across the three nights of the event
• Base 207 was a great base by Gordon Rovers which revolved around a team getting stuck in a whiteout while exploring the Swiss Alps and incorporated many mountaineering skills to successfully navigate a team to safety
• VOC 2 provides hot, fresh doughnuts to all Venturers on arrival and have many night activities to incorporate a wide variety of Venturers, from quiet spaces, to minute to win it activities, movie and dance tents and more.

VOC 3 – Tim Ryan

• VOC 3 is mostly made up of South Metropolitan and South Coast and Tablelands Rover Scouts and Leaders. There are increasing numbers from The Golden West and even from the ACT! We regularly see a number of Guides participate in VOC 3 too
• Our theme was Night at the Museum – along the lines of natural history, science, technology, archaeology, art, etc
• We had more than 150 people make up VOC 3 this year and collectively ran 11 activity bases for the Venturer Scouts. At night we had 120 teams stay the night with us at some point across the weekend
• VOC 3 is known for our great night activities and this year we had a great spread of fun activities, including aerial sock wrestling, blindfolded billy cart racking, popcorn cart and a racing simulator
• The best activity base from VOC 3 this year was Base 307 – “Indiana Jones and the Whispers of the Lost Relics” which involved teams completing challenges inspired from the Indiana Jones storyline – complete with lasers, mirrors, a large inflatable boulder and a leap of faith
• To run VOC 3, it takes a core team more than six months of planning and an entire week before the event in the forest to set up the VOC site, including plumbing, power, showers and lighting
• We have a great network of previous commanders and experienced VOC staff to advise and lend a hand during the event, which makes the job much easier!
• VOC 3 is unique as we are a Rover run VOC. Each year we elect a new VOC Commander, who must be a Rover Scout or Olave, and the core VOC team is generally all Rovers too
• Since Dragon Skin 2016 “Colours”, VOC 3 has been associated with the colour blue, which is why all our VOC 3 hoodies and shirts are blue.

VOC 4 – Luke McIvor (Deputy Commander)

• 183 Rover Scouts and other adults were on VOC 4 throughout the event running activity bases and supporting the VOC facilities
• VOC 4’s theme was A Day in the Wilderness. We adventured into the undiscovered worlds of the oasis, jungles, the alpine mountains and murky swamps
• Our most popular activity was a gyrocopter which saw participants spun around to imitate a helicopter crashing into a wilderness environment
• Venturer Scouts used 436GB of free Wi-Fi to stay in contact with family and friends, update their socials on their experience and provide real-time feedback on the event to organisers
• It takes six days to set up the required infrastructure and utilities on the VOC site before the majority of Rover Scouts and Venturer Scouts arrive. It takes one day to completely pack down the site.

Looking ahead

Dink thanked all the Rovers, Leaders and supporters for the many hours of work put in to making Dragon Skin 2024 so successful.

“2025 is an exciting year for Dragon Skin, as we will celebrate our 40th event!” he said. “Stay tuned for all the details, it’s not to be missed!”