Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Out and about on 'Keep Australia Beautiful' day

One of the things we parents dread is party invitations for our kids when the invitee is living somewhere beyond whoop whoop. We are expected to provide the transport. Yesterday there was a must-attend summons for our second teenage daughter. She has a part time counter job at the local bakery.

Last year one of her workmates became pregnant and seems destined to be a single mother, living with her own mother. The baby is due in a few weeks and so yesterday it was time for a baby shower. The house was in a new suburb called Success. It's located in what used to be the back blocks of Jandakot - a once a sandy wasteland inhabited by pig farmers and horse breeders. A place where land was maybe a couple of hundred dollars an acre when I was a teenager.

Times have changed. The urban developers have ensured that a tiny block of land on which to jam a house can set you back 300,000 dollars.

So yesterday my wife and I plotted how to best fill in our time between dropping off our daughter and picking her up. We decided to back track to one of our old favourites, the Jandakot Dutch Windmill nursery. I've mentioned it affectionately from time to time in Fremantlebiz.

We discovered yesterday that it has changed hands. The Dutch/Australian family who created the landmark so many decades ago have retired and moved on. The new management are reordering the place to their liking. I took a photo of the windmill-house still guarding the nursery entrance. It's starting to show its age too. Click here to see it.

After spending some time there we went to a nearby McDonalds for an icecream and then visited a pet shop specialising in lizards and pythons. This was very interesting - sort of like for ten minutes. I saw a python move an inch.

We meandered out way back towards where our daughter was learning the baby business. On the way we stopped at a park in Success. I suppose it's the central feature of the suburb. It's what's left of the natural wetlands after the urban developers moved in. An artificial lake devoid of life and surrounded by a vast expanse of grass which has to be regularly watered and mowed. At the southern end is a small stretch of original reeds. At the northern end is a covered area, plus a drinking water fountain and an assemblage of playground furniture - no fresh kids' footprints in the sand.

A sign says no swimming in the lake. No one in their right mind would. It was a reddish colour like you might expect downstream of Chernobyl. Here and there were discarded food and drink containers bearing the distinctive golden arches trademark of Maccas and one pizza box from Domino's.

There are a lot of parklands like this in the Perth metropolitan area. I suspect they are only popular with the families of urban planners. I took a photo for Paroramio. Click here to see it. I thought the dead duck in the foreground seemed to say it all.

We collected our daughter and wended our way trough more brave new suburbs towards home. En-route we passed the vast Sims scrap metal yard in Cockburn. Most Western Australian scrap metal, including any vehicles past their use-by-date eventually come to this place to be chopped and sorted for export. Sims might be the ultimate recyclers - certainly the biggest. I think nowadays all their output goes in regular shiploads from Fremantle to the polluting smelters of China.

Being Sunday the place was closed, so I took a photo over the fence. During the week there are so many trucks on the move it would be a bit too dangerous to indulge in such a dalliance. Click here to see junkyard heaven.

Actually I wouldn't mind living next to this place in a house with double glazed panoramic windows. It's very interesting to watch everything working, much more so than the urban planners' park lakes.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

Click here to visit 'dogandcatwatcher', my YouTube website.

Original still photographs are stored online in a cache at my Panoramio website or my Picasa site. Most of them have a brief description and a link back to a relevant essay. Images on Panoramio can usually be enlarged several times by clicking them.

About the writer

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Check out each month's subject index on the Calendar Page for my "common-man" monologues about survival in 21st century Australia – plus a little history occasionally. An original essay is added most days as part of an undertaking to write at least couple of million words. Zzzzzzzz!