Adding community gardens to our parks would help build our resilience

Morning walks regularly take me past two or three of Shepparton’s small community parks south of the railway station.

One of Shepparton's many
small parks that could easily
be a community garden.

This mosaic of parks was once the focus of activity with regular gatherings, kids playing and people talking, adding much neighbourhood building and bonding.

With rare exceptions, and one is Victory Park in St George’s Road for with a cricket pitch and being big enough for soccer is used regularly, most have fallen largely into disuse.

The City of Greater Shepparton has invested, in some cases, in the establishment sophisticated and safe play equipment, but missing, mostly, is the throng of kids and adults that would bring life to the parks.

A fellow who lives near a park said that it was once a space used every two or three weeks for an event organized by a former local councillor, but now it was largely unused and simply little more than a “short-cut’ for pedestrians.

A retired fellow, who lived close to a nearby park when his kids were young, said they always wanted to play there, but now its use, despite having a sophisticated and safe playground, had dropped close to zero.

The parks, well cared for and ringed by houses are a wonderful community asset and are perfectly placed to play a critical role in helping those nearby feed themselves as a different future emerges.

Beyond being the perfect place for community gardens they are equally a perfect space to launch a community strengthening program; a program that hopefully would allow escape from the individualism that has predominated for decades, but happily goes missing when communities are troubled by disaster, as is evident with such things as bushfires.

Realities, facts that are clearly indisputable, point to the importance of the City of Greater Shepparton taking the lead, that is what leaders are meant to do, to begin a movement that would see our mosaic of parks become, in addition to what they already are, community gardens.

The present picture in Australia is one of plenty, but with the rapid depletion of various fossil resources such as oil, gas and phosphorous (an essential ingredient in fertilizers and without which most of Australia’s ancient soils will grow little), and to further complicate things, top soil, the abundance we enjoy is finite.

Living on the driest of continents, we need to do all possible to save water and with a whole neighbourhood contributing to just one garden, such conservation is possible.

Listening to many of Australia’s leading thinkers who have no obvious ideological bias or links to various lobby groups, say we have passed our economic “sweet spot” and with the resources boom in retreat, our future resilience is linked to far simpler things; things such as community gardens.