Ms Woko & I visited Hazelwood Park in Adelaide last Sunday.
The park is populated with people on pleasant days & the swimming pool is a great attraction when the weather is hot. The park is also populated with large River Redgums Eucalyptus camaldulensis & no native understorey which provide classic habitat for, you guessed it, noisy miners, as well as musk & rainbow lorikeets. Not a wren, thornbill, tree creeper, silver eye or other small bird was in sight.
But the most disturbing thing about the park is that there are no River Redgum seedlings. Not one, that I could see. I guess they're all mowed into oblivion each time the mower mows the plentiful Kikuyu grass which, admittedly, is great for spreading the picnic blanket on. But in the not too distant future, when the huge, mature River Redgums begin to die out Hazelwood Park will begin to look like a relatively vast, open space, ripe for housing development.
Hazelwood Park highlights the need for councils to think longer, much longer, term, especially when it comes to environmental matters. There's probably little hope of this in areas where councils are controlled by developers unless people make counter-balancing noises.
