Page 5348 - Week 12 - Thursday, 28 October 2010
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The noticeable thing about it was that everybody there was enthusiastic about their garden. They had a wide variety of reasons why they were enthusiastic. It was an incredibly diverse group of people. Some of the community gardens have been set up, for instance, to help groups of refugees, particularly refugees who came from rural areas in their home countries and who really wanted to have a connection with the soil and actually be able to grow things again. There were long-term unemployed. There was even a community garden for people suffering from brain injury of various descriptions. Of course, there were a lot of community gardens whose major emphasis was growing things and plants.
One of the community gardens I visited earlier this year in St Kilda in Melbourne was a good example of a community garden with a number of agendas. It is a great place. If you are ever in St Kilda, I recommend that you pop by because it is open to the public, I think at all times. It has a covered kitchen space, a bit of lawn for you to sit around and a wonderful garden with some very nice little sculptures in it. People working in St Kilda will go down and sit there to have their lunch or a cup of coffee. There were clearly a lot of very interested people from the high-rise areas who came down there. That is their backyard. That is where they hang out. That is where they do their gardening.
In Canberra we have about 13 community gardens run by COGS and I am aware there is a long waiting list to join them. There is a couple of years waiting list for most of the community gardens in Canberra. COGS is finding itself somewhat stretched in terms of establishing new gardens because the demand certainly far outstrips the supply. One of the things that we should be looking to in our future development of Canberra is providing spaces for community gardens in new suburbs.
The other thing I would like to say, particularly based on some of the wonderful gardens in other parts of Australia, is that we should not look at community gardens as being just for the new parts of Canberra. Every part of Canberra almost certainly has a space that could be turned into a community garden and people who would love to have that community garden. So I commend community gardens to the Assembly.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
The Assembly adjourned at 5.54 pm until Tuesday, 16 November 2010, at 10 am.
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