7.4.2

Section 2 Welcome to all of you. . . Can everybody see and hear me?

Good, I’m Sally, your guide for the tour of the Bicentennial Park. . .

I hope that you’re all wearing in your most comfortable shoes and that you can keep up the pace.

So, let’s get under way on our tour around this wonderful park.

I’ll start today with some general background information.

There used to be a lot of factories in this area until the 1960s.

Creating the park required the demolition of lots of derelict buildings on the site, so most of the exciting park space all around you was originally warehouses and storehouses.

The idea of building a public park here was first discussed when a property developer proposed a high-rise housing development, but the local community wasn’t happy.

If the land was cleaned up, they want to use the site for recreation.

Resident wanted open space for outdoor activities, rather the housing and even an indoor sports complex.

Now, to the Bicentennial Park itself, It has two areas, a natural reserve and a formal park with man-made features and gardens.

The tall blue-and-white building in front of us is called The Tower and is the centre point for the formal gardens.

It stands twelve meters high, so follow me the upstairs to where we can take advantage of the fantastic views.

Well, here we are at the top of The Tower, and we’re going on to look at the view from each direction.

Out to the east, the large building about a kilometer away are on the Olympic site.

There is an indoor arena for Gymnastics, a stadium for track and field and a swimming pool for races and synchronised swimming, and also diving.

If you look carefully down there you can see the train lines.

The Olympic site has it’s own station to encourage the use of public transport.

There’s also have a car park, but it only holds a limited number of cars.

The formal park has some specially-created water features.

If you look out here to the south, you can see a circular ornamental Pond.

And around to the west, you can relax and seat on the bench to smell the flowers in the Rose Garden, and finally up to the north, if you look in front of you now.

There is the lake with a small island in the center, you can hire rowing boats from the boat shed, which you can’t see from here, but if you look through the trees, you can see the cafe which has lovely views across the water.

OK, let’s climb down now.

We’ll go now and have a look at the nature reserve section of the park, which has opened up natural wetland to the public.

The Mangroves have been made more accessible to visitors by the boardwalk build during the park’s upgrade.

You’d think that people would come here to look at the unusual plant life of the area, but in fact it’s more often used for cycling and is very popular with the local clubs.

This is the far end of the park and over there you can see the Frog Pond, a natural feature here long before the park was designed.

Just next to it we have our outdoor classroom, a favourite spot for school parties.

The area is now most often used by primary schools for Biology lessons.

And finally let’s pass by the Waterbird Refuge.

This area is in a sheltered part of the estuary.

That’s why the park’s viewing shelter is a favourite spot for bird watchers who can use it to spy through binoculars.

You can watch a variety of water birds, but most visitors expect to see black swans when they come to the shelter.

You might spot one yourself right now!

Well, here we are back at our starting point, the visitors center.