Fremantlebiz - Paul's Letter from Australia

Some remnant bushland in Attadale

I've mentioned before that my parents built what I believe was the first house after WW2 in the virgin bushland of Attadale. The now prestigious suburb was almost entirely bush in those days, and as a kid I was wandering well out of sight of our home by the time I was four. I never became lost.

As more houses were built, so more kids appeared. In the early fifties there was much excitement when a quantity of huge pine packing cases were almost magically plonked down in the middle of the bush via a boggy sand track. They contained the prefabricated Attadale primary school. Progress had arrived in gumnut land. I can clearly remember climbing up on top of the crates before the clearing and construction began.

During my lifetime great swathes of Attadale's native bushland were cleared and ephemeral swamps filled in. However there was the occasional hesitation. Here and there a few small patches of bushland were preserved.

We went to one of these reserves yesterday afternoon - Harry Sandon Park. It's a little eastward of Attadale Primary School. I was a young adult backpacking overseas when the park was set aside in 1970 . It narrowly escaped becoming a grassed sports ground. Harry Sandon was a former Melville Council gardener. Here's a Google Earth view of it. None of the surrounding houses existed when I was a young kid. Maybe they still didn't in 1970.

It's a nice patch of bush as small patches of bush go. Still quite thick, and with a diverse range of native trees and undergrowth. The last time I was there was a few years ago and I thought I'd seen some veldt grass, a noxious south African introduction which has run rampant in the nearby Wireless Hill reserve. But yesterday I didn't see any. This next picture sort of illustrates what most of the whole of Attadale used to be like in the early 1950s. It's the type of bush I regularly played in.

What's obvious in the picture is that its a long time since there was a fire. The Melville Shire authority has a strict no-controlled-burn policy and so inevitably a dangerous accumulation of dry fuel builds up. It's then taken advantage of by firebugs; as happened at Wireless Hill a couple of weeks ago. Fires used to be a normal seasonal phenomena on the coastal plain. Several species such as banksias are dependent on them for seed germination.

Some banksia trees were coming into in bloom yesterday. The species in the picture is Banksia menziesii. Some folk contemptuously call it the firewood banksia because they regard it as only good for that purpose. Maybe it should be called the Olympic banksia because it resembles a torch? The flowers open from the bottom over a period of days until the entire package is a mass of yellow pollen stamens. The flowers are very popular with honey bees, native birds and ants.

I intend to go back to this park with one of my kids during the school holidays and spend a few hours taking pictures of smaller things like ants.

© MMVIII Paul R. Weaver.

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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.

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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!