Mandurah - Part 1

[maewyn_2]

We've just experienced  Perth's driest and hottest summer on record. Last Sunday we decided to get out of the house for the day and go somewhere a bit cooler.  We caught a train into Perth, then another on to Mandurah (pronounced Man-joor-ah).

Mandurah sits at the entrance to the Peel Inlet/Harvey Estuary, about 80km south of where we live.  It was

Comments

[mechtild]

That's a good idea. Here, the maintenance of bushes and trees over roads and walkways officially belongs to the city, since they are planted on ground that actually belongs to them (about thirteen feet in from curbs, so that sidewalks are not owned by residents). However, since the city is so strapped for cash due to the economy and eroded tax base* (which is why they let go all the part-time casual workforce at the libraries, which includes me), they haven't been doing routine trimming for a few years. If a boulevard tree actually has to come down because of weakness due to age, illness, or storm damage, they still do that, but the pruning they used to do routinely ended. Homeowners are invested in keeping their part of the street looking nice do it themselves. Otherwise, the bushes crowding into sidewalks and limbs hanging at face level have remained untrimmed.

*The tax base has eroded significantly from what it was decades ago, when Duluth had a lot of mining and other industry-related jobs. When the steel industry was hit hard in the seventies and eighties the city lost a lot of population when so many decent-paying jobs went away permanently. The only job growth has been in tourism-related jobs, typically low-paying work with no benefits. These new jobs still mean much lower revenues, since their low salaries yield far fewer tax dollars. Gee, I'll bet you didn't need to know all that about Duluth, Minnesota!