The park is soggy and a bit squishy after rain but six-year-old twins Rob and John Washburn are not deterred. Picking up spades left at a pop-up nature play area in Callan Park in Sydney’s inner west, they began excavating.

“They dig a hole, fill it up again, and start again,” says their mother, Sonia Washburn of Leichhardt. “This is just what they want to do. They want to pick up things, bang things. It is tapping into something primordial.”

With sticks provided that may be wielded in a duel or stacked to make the side wall of a cubby, the nature play area in Sydney’s inner west is running for the duration of the school holidays.

Installed by experts from Centennial Parklands, nature or wild play aims to stimulate imaginative and unstructured play and encourage children (and their parents) to connect with the natural world and switch off their electronic devices.

At the same time as the Washburn twins are digging, another set of twins, Sophia and Theodore (last names withheld) turn a long bit of bamboo into a see-saw. Holding ropes suspended from an enormous tree, they teeter, bounce and, briefly, balance.