Lords Of Bin Town, an urban tale of ibises and skaters. 
Photographs and words by Mike O'Meally

Two renegades of Sydney City life: the skateboarder and the ibis cross paths often and often without notice. However, it’s fair to say both have often been seen as a nuisance and often called worse! Like the heroic skaters of the 1970s Venice Beach, the humble and majestic ibis struts to a beat all its own—going places where birds are not supposed to go and going well, thank you very much! Adapting to the urban environment, they share a lot in common with the modern-day skaters of Sydney City and their mutual ability to repurpose this concrete ecosystem for their own benefit and survival, perhaps only bested by their unusual grace of movement and hardy dispositions. 

As a photographer of skaters for over 30 years, I could not help but give my attention and pay my respects to these odd and ancient-looking birds. They regularly get shooed away and cussed callously, and any skater worth their salt can relate to that! Occasionally, you will see the skaters and the ibis cross paths, and it can lead to some interesting interactions of flapping feathers and frustrated feelings, but amongst the madness, also fleeting moments of synchronicity between outcasts. Perhaps we all enjoy Schadenfreude at some level, but if one skater’s crash is another man’s pleasure, then surely the Lord of the Binz is our National Treasure. 
 

Main image top: Taylor Square on Oxford Street in Darlinghurst is a well-used hangout for skaters since the 1990s, and they still make the best of it today. With its smooth bricks and various skate-able ledges, bollards, and stairs, it can host an array of manoeuvres as well as providing a great place to sit and drink a cold beer and talk some smack. Jarrad Carlin passes through the back of “T Square” on Bourke Street as two ibises take flight towards the N.A.S.

Dear Mike, huge thanks to you and the skater crew for working with Wilderness Journal on this story. Here's to the ibises—and to finding beauty and the natural world in the city. 

Urban legends: the Australian white ibis

Bin chickens, tip turkeys, dump ducks, picnic pirates. Ibis have many names, but for Dr John Martin—ecologist and city bird expert—it doesn’t matter what you call them: these inspirational Aussie battlers have reached icon status, and they’re here to stay.  

Interview by Meg Bauer. Photographs Dr John Martin.

Meg: Now correct me if I’m wrong, because you’re obviously the expert, but I believe Australia actually has three species of native ibis—the white, the glossy, and the straw-necked—but the one we’re going to be talking about today is the one found in urban areas, which is the white ibis.

John: Correct. In some parts of the country, particularly up north, you can see straw-necks more commonly—even in some urban areas like Brisbane and Sydney. That’s the species you’ll see in flooded paddocks when you’re driving across the countryside in the Riverina for example, or in cow paddocks out near Campbelltown or Penrith. But the species people associate with our cities is the Australian white ibis. The third species is the glossy ibis, which is about half the size of the Oz white ibis.

Meg: I know historically Australians have been quite down on the white ibis. What is the genesis of this hate? Do we know who coined the term 'bin chicken', or when hating on them became the cultural norm?

John: [Laughs] Look, I’ve said for 20 years now: our relationship with ibis is love-hate. And when we go back to the origins of this, it’s actually a misidentification.

So for you and I—you grew up in Brisbane, I grew up in Sydney—as little kids, we didn’t see a lot of ibis. They weren’t that common in the city, until they started adapting to live with us.

People who didn’t know them thought they were a non-native species. And we have a prejudice against non-native species—think of the cane toad as an example. At the time, they were called the ‘sacred ibis’, which was the wrong name, because they were thought to be the same species that occurs in Africa. It wasn’t until the late 80s when a reassessment confirmed they are a separate Australian species. (And for those of us who love a little bit of bird nerdery, they also occur in New Guinea and Indonesia!)

Meg: When was it that they started to become more common in cities? 

John: So here in Sydney, it was the early 80s. But even then, you wouldn’t really have noticed unless you were bird watching at wetlands; in the 90s ibis became more common in parks—they started to share our picnics. It really is a thing of the last 25 years where we have this larger number of ibis in more urban areas of both Sydney and Brisbane.

And there is a really cool backstory to this: in the 1960s, Healesville Sanctuary—a regional zoo in Victoria—collected some of these chicks from the wild and put them in a cage to exhibit. They subsequently grew and matured and had babies, then kept successfully having lots and lots of babies.

So the sanctuary opened the cage to let them out, thinking they’d fly away. But they didn’t. They simply enjoyed the free food. And then the staff thought, we’ll move some of these birds away. And they tried that in multiple different ways, including taking the birds to Sydney, Canberra and the Gold Coast.

Meg: So if we’re looking for someone to blame…

John: I’m not saying chicken and egg—like it’s all Healesville Sanctuary’s fault! That’s not what I’m saying! And I’m not saying that the released birds at Taronga Zoo in the 70s is why we have a huge urban ibis population. A multitude of effects are going on here.

One of them is, most importantly, how we’ve degraded their natural habitats out in the western wetlands and the Murray-Darling Basin. And these birds move huge distances—like, hundreds of kilometres in a single day. This is a natural behaviour, because if you know anything about the Murray-Darling Basin, it’s a boom-bust cycle. It floods and there’s all this habitat, and birds from all over the country flock there—including the ibis. And then that flood moves on down, the river dries up, and they have to move to other habitats. 

But the birds in urban areas have learned this new behaviour of scavenging—not just from us directly, but through food that we place in bins. They’ve learned that they can go to that absolute buffet of daily delights at the landfill.

And of course, the urban environment is full of water. We’ve created all these constructed wetlands, and we also planted—particularly in Sydney—a myriad of beautiful condominiums for them called palm trees, which is not a natural nesting habitat, but they have absolutely adapted to it. They’ve turned the phoenix palm in particular, which is not a native palm tree, into an ibis sanctuary. They’ve actually changed their behaviour there. 

When I go out to the western wetlands, ibis see us from 200m away and go: Biscuits! Run! Of course, here in the city, they’re like: there’s some people having a picnic—let’s go say g’day! Different behaviours in different environments.

Meg: How rare is it for a species to adapt its behaviour over such a short time span? Like, we’re only talking decades here.

John: You just have to look around the urban environment. You know, our magpies, our noisy miners, our sulphur-crested cockatoos—there’s a suite of Australian native birds that have really taken to the city.

And the common story here is that they’re all big in comparison to other birds. These big birds are able to fly longer distances out in the open. They’re less susceptible to predators and less susceptible to other threats in the landscape. They generally have diverse diets. Ibis are typically out there eating frogs, snakes, fish, grubs—but here in the city they can eat bread, tomato… you know, adaptable!

Meg: It’s quite extraordinary that out of all of the Australian native birds that could have adapted to our built environment, it’s this large waterbird that’s come from the wetlands that ends up filling one of these roles. Even though the built environment is vastly different to a wetland.

John: It is completely bizarre. We don’t really know why they would have chosen to do it.

And equally, we started talking about the fact that there are three native ibis species in Australia. Well, the other two haven’t adapted in this way, though they have the exact same capacity: they’ve got long legs, they’ve got a long beak and a long neck. So those natural human foraging opportunities in a bin or in a landfill—they’ve got the exact same capability, but they don’t have the behaviour. They haven’t adapted.

So yeah, we don’t know why. It’s really just: they learn this new behaviour and this is natural selection. Because it is working for them. They are breeding successfully in the urban environment. They are foraging successfully. 

Meg: And really enjoying the food.

John: Variety is the spice of life! Noodles one day, pho the next.

Meg: Do you think Australians’ attitudes towards white ibis are beginning to change?

John: Yeah, definitely. There has been a lot of media interest over the past two decades about the fact that they’re an Aussie battler. 

Meg: I even saw you on Play School recently, talking about ibis!

John: There you go. See: you’ve got to get them when they’re young. Big Ted is a big ibis fan.

But in all seriousness: the actual important thing here relates to something that I mentioned earlier, which is if we go back to the 80s, people weren’t used to ibis. Well, go back ten years: kids and adults became used to ibis in the park. They might be that annoying bird, but most adults recognised them as a native bird, or at least a familiar one.

We have a different behaviour to a species that we know or are familiar with versus a species that we view as invasive or unfamiliar. And that is quite literally, I think, what is the biggest change: we’ve got a generation that has grown up with ibis. And yep, they can be annoying, but they’re a native bird. They’re here. We live with them. It’s a different attitude.

"And that’s why people have ibis tattoos. People have ibis on clothes. We watch cartoons about ibis drinking bin juice; read children’s books about them. There’s all sorts of ibis media out there. They have become an iconic species. They’re part of our common language now."

Meg: That’s a nice way to put it. Can you talk to me about some of the research you’ve been involved in around ibises and how that knowledge is helping to deepen our understanding about these birds?

John: I’ve been involved in research where we’ve marked individual birds so we can learn about what’s called site fidelity and how they move between different habitats. So, you know: is Centennial Park the home of this bird, or does it just hang out there every now and then? And that’s how I could see that birds from Centennial Park, for example, would fly 35km out to Eastern Creek to go to the landfill and then back again. 

So they’re flying 70 ks because the food is so good, even though there are a heap of different foraging opportunities within a few kilometres—both natural in the wetlands, but also humans having picnics! These birds are highly mobile, and they can do both of those things. They can forage locally during the day, and then they can also decide it’s lunchtime, I’m going to go out to the tip, and they can still come back in the afternoon. Sydney traffic to them is sweet. It’s fine. Air traffic is under control. 

We’ve also got some marked birds that are over 20 years old now. So we’re learning about how long they live.

We’ve even had birds move from Sydney up to Townsville, so they can move long distances. We’ve also fit transmitters on birds out in the western wetlands, and had birds move from Victoria up to North Queensland as well.

Meg: During Covid?

John: [Laughs] That’s a good line. Even the ibis wanted to escape the lockdown! 

So that reflects that natural boom-bust behaviour at that national scale. These birds can move big distances. You might see ibis in your local park and think, oh, that’s annoying. Well, they’re part of a network of ibis that occur across the whole city that can also move across the whole state.

There’s actually thousands of ibis in Sydney and thousands of ibis in Brisbane. And they’re here to stay. 

Meg: You’ve given quite a few already, but is there anything else unique or remarkable about white ibises that most Australians wouldn’t know?

John: This is a thought you’ve probably never had about bin chickens: an ibis in the natural wetlands is a predator. We don’t think of ibis like we think of lions or eagles. But they’re actually stalking through the water, silently observing, and then snatching their prey and eating it down. I’ve actually had an ibis that we’ve caught regurgitate five frogs out of its stomach. This species is a hunter—out there not just scavenging bread, but hunting in the landscape. 

So they perform an ecological role, of course. That’s why the straw-necked ibis are known as “farmer’s friend”, because they’re eating the locust larvae.

Also, if you haven’t heard ‘A Song About Birds’, I recommend you look that up. And if you don’t like expletives, don’t look it up. It’s a song about ibis.

So they’re an inspiration, I think, is what they are. There are a few other birds that are an inspiration to people, but ibis, I think, could have the biggest reach of all birds.

"One of the things that I say to people is: I don’t care if people call them a bin chicken, or a picnic pirate, or tip turkey, whatever it is: if you know the name of a bird, you have a connection, even if that name is not an affectionate name. Actually, a lot of us call them bin chickens with affection. And you may not know that they’re called the Australian white ibis, but who cares? You know what that bird is."

There are a heap of species out there that we don’t know the names of, and we don’t care about things we don’t know about. So, I think, in this age of distraction, that is cut-through. And part of that is the digital presence as well as the physical presence, as well as the traditional presence, which is books.

So yeah, they’re pretty amazing birds, when you think about them.

Meg: What can the average Australian do to help white ibises? What do they need to be healthy and thrive?

John: The reality is we actually need to work towards human-nature coexistence. So that actually means having policies that support climate change mitigation, having policies that support biodiversity—those sorts of things. This is really big picture. That’s actually how you help them.

Ibis are impacted by the fact that humans dominate the landscape—controlling the water resources in the Murray River. They’re the Aussie battlers flying the flag in the city here. They’re literally on Macquarie Street opposite the New South Wales Parliament, drinking from fountains because there’s no water in the rivers. If only the politicians could see that and appreciate that, you know, it’s not just our farmers who need a fair go; it’s our plants and animals as well. And the point there is: we need farmers. You can’t exclude farmers from the landscape. This is about coexistence.

We have a project called Big City Birds, and we’re aiming to learn more about bird behaviour, with ibis one of our study species. We’re interested in your observations of ibis, but also other interesting big city birds. You can report them on our app or website anywhere in the country.

I’m also a co-author of A Guide to the Creatures in Your Neighbourhood, which is a popular science book, and talks about a whole heap of Australian native species—including a chapter on ibis.

Meg: Final word: is there anything else you’d like people to know about ibises?

John: Lots of people haven’t seen baby ibis.

"Ibis eggs are quite literally the same size as the chicken eggs in your fridge. And so when a baby ibis hatches, it’s this 50 to 60 gram tiny little fluffball, with this tiny little nose, that looks a little bit like Gonzo. And they just squeak, and they’re cute as."

And yeah, as they grow up, they are smelly and they are messy. But you know what? When you look at that little cute fluffball baby, you realise that they’re just living their lives. This is them adapting to an environment that we have hugely modified. And you have to respect that.

That’s what I think: these Aussie battlers, we just got to give them a fair go.

Thanks to Dr John Martin for talking with Wilderness Journal and for spreading the love of ibis.

Choosing Hope: Victoria Jack and the Work of Protecting New South Wales’ Forests
 

Interview by Rhiannon Cunningham; Photographs by Renae Saxby. 

A fifty-year legacy isn’t built in the past. It is defined, over and over again, by the new. 

New people, new strategies and new campaigns take root, and the work continues in ways that might look different to the years before.

Victoria Jack is part of the latest generation of Wilderness Society Campaigners. She manages the Wilderness Society’s campaigns in NSW, working on issues ranging from native forest logging to offshore gas expansion, and national campaigns to strengthen nature laws and hold corporations to account. 

Growing up in the Hunter region of NSW, unique and iconic forests were never far away. They were simply part of life.

“I spent a lot of time outdoors,” Victoria tells me. “Abseiling and hiking and camping with my family. I’ve always spent a lot of time in nature.”

But like many people who grow up close to wild places, she didn’t imagine that connection would eventually become her work. In fact, when Australia’s wild places started calling to her, she wasn’t even in the country. 

The fire that brought her home

When the Black Summer Bushfires tore their way through the country in the late months of 2019, Victoria was living in Myanmar, and working for the UN’s International Organisation for Migration. 

So far from home, watching the devastating fires scorch the land from a distance was a particular kind of pain. 

“It was this strange experience of watching this monumental disaster unfolding in your home country from far away,” Victoria explains. 

“You remember all those photos of Sydney covered in smoke and stories about people having trouble breathing? Experiencing that from a distance was painful. You’re watching something catastrophic happen to your home, and you’re not there.”

For Victoria, this was the catalyst that set her on the path of the Wilderness Society. 

“I decided I was going to move home and find a job working for nature.”

A campaign close to home

It didn’t take long for the work to find her.

When Victoria returned home to Newcastle, she learned of a proposal to expand a quarry near Brandy Hill. The quarry expansion would lead to the destruction of precious koala habitat when it was so sorely needed after the Black Summer Bushfires. 

Victoria teamed up with a local woman who lived right near the proposed development, and together they campaigned to protect this patch of precious forest. 

“We just started a campaign together,” she remembers. “It was basically the first federal decision about koala habitat after the bushfires.”

Victoria notes that timing was everything. 

“It was partly the moment, that post-bushfire moment…it was wild how much attention it got, we had heaps of celebrity endorsements!”

Jimmy Barnes, Olivia Newton-John and Colin Hay were amongst those who lent their voice to the campaign. No small feat, and yet her retelling makes it sound disarmingly casual: “I just did that as a volunteer; we just started the thing.”

For Victoria, this was proof positive that grassroots campaigning carried real impact. Not long after, she took the opportunity to become the Wilderness Society’s NSW Campaigns Manager and the rest is history.

Learning the movement 

When Victoria joined the Wilderness Society, she stepped into a movement with decades of history behind it. The core work remained familiar: protecting forests, challenging destructive industries and nurturing public support for conservation.

But the context of campaigning has shifted. The media landscape, political playing field, and technological terrain have all changed over time in ways nobody could have ever predicted.

Victoria explains that really, campaigning is all about being responsive to the ways the work is evolving around us.

“Being a campaigner is largely about figuring out what leverage points we have that we can use to pressure decision-makers. That is what makes the job so diverse."

“The minute, say, a vested interest learns about a particular leverage point you used to win a campaign last time, they lobby the government to create a new law or find some other way to shut it down. You have to be creative, and always think of new ways to figure out how you can get an outcome for nature.”

One of Victoria’s most memorable campaign moments took place just last year at the Woolworths Annual General Meeting. 

The Wilderness Society had been campaigning the supermarket giant to commit to deforestation-free supply chains. On this day in October, Victoria found herself, microphone in hand, face-to-face with the Woolworths Group Chair.

“I got to get on the mic in front of a room full of shareholders and said to the Chair that the dodgy PEFC timber certification scheme they use won’t ensure Woolworths’ supply chains are deforestation-free. He called me ‘cheeky’ and said ‘you can’t really call them dodgy’, and I quickly retorted, ‘oh, I’ve checked that with my lawyers’, which led to some giggles in the room!”

“The thing I love most is being able to go into rooms like that and speak truth to power. Politicians and corporate decision-makers know we are backed by a lot of people who care about nature. And they know there are consequences if they don’t deliver.”

That collective backing is something the Wilderness Society has cultivated carefully over fifty years, and it remains just as important today.

“We’ve gone around the continent collecting people who care about nature,” she says. “And now we’re backed by all of them.”

The moment that stayed with her

Even in campaigning, many of the most formative moments happen away from microphones and meeting rooms. 

Early in her time at the Wilderness Society, Victoria worked on the campaign to stop coal exploration near Wollemi National Park. The proposal earmarked state forest that sat just outside the boundary of the park for desctruction. 

“We flew a drone over the forest,” Victoria recalls. “And there is nothing different about the forest from up there when you cross the border from World Heritage to state forest. The boundary is just a line someone drew on the map.”

For Victoria, moments like that reinforce what forests actually mean beyond the lines drawn on planning maps.

“Forests are home to the highest percentages of biodiversity,” she explains. “That’s where most of our biodiversity is situated. They’re also sites of cultural heritage for First Nations people.”

“When forests are left standing, they protect humans in so many ways. They help protect us from bushfires, they clean our air, water and soil.”

“We can’t survive without forests. All our lives are better with forests in them.”

But it was working with the local communities during that campaign that really made a lasting impact on her view of the world. 

Many of the local residents had just lived through the largest forest fire ever recorded in Australia: the Gospers Mountain fire. 

“Then all of a sudden, the NSW government is talking about coal mining in this same forest!” Victoria sounds incredulous, recounting the details of the proposal. 

But people began working together immediately—ecologists, locals, National Parks staff and environmental campaigners, like Victoria. 

It was during this time that Victoria was lucky to spend time travelling on Country with Dabee Wiradjuri man, Peter Swain. He explained to her how the cultural heritage sites that dotted the landscape were all connected through songlines—and how damaging one site breaks the whole story. 

“Some of the words Peter said to me are etched in my memory forever. He said, ‘we’ve been taking the magic out of the land for far too long, and now we have to put some of the magic back’.”

“So I guess ever since then, that is what I have been trying to do.”

The moment we are in

Recently, Victoria was driving through the forests along the Dorrigo Plateau, part of the Eastern Coastal and Range Forests icon area the Wilderness Society is working to protect.

“I saw three lyrebirds in one day,” she tells me. “I’ve never seen three lyrebirds in a day before!”

“It gives you a little flavour of just how biodiverse the forests are up there,” she says. “And until recently, they were being logged.”

The forests Victoria was travelling through now fall within the area included in the logging moratorium associated with the establishment of the Great Koala National Park, a campaign she worked hard to help secure. Across large parts of the mid-north coast, logging has paused while the park is formalised.

It marked a significant step forward for forest protection in New South Wales, but the work is far from finished.

“There are still many other forests along the east coast and out to the Great Dividing Range that are high conservation value and still subject to native forest logging,” Victoria says.

“Protecting [these forests] is the first part,” she says. “But then we have to restore them.”

Choosing hope

Asked what gives her hope about the future of forests in New South Wales, Victoria doesn’t talk about particular policies or political moments. Her answer is far more simple than that. 

“I think hope is a choice.

“You can choose to be hopeful.”

For her, the choice comes partly from the people she works alongside every day.

“There are so many people out there trying to make the world better,” she says.

“It’s an incredible community of people driven by purpose, and it’s good to feel like you’re some small part of that.”

Wilderness Journal thanks Victoria Jack and Renae Saxby for coming together on a recent afternoon to make these pictures. Renae's upcoming exhibition Fire Scars opens at the Maitland Regional Gallery on 28 April and runs until 14 June 2026. 

Perth: Wonder Land

In a newly completed study, Wonder Land, Daniel Jan Martin offers a proposal for a new approach to planning with place, and a celebration of a wonderland that has always-already been part of our cities. 

These excerpts from Wonder Land offer a glimpse into a deeply researched, collaborative work, alongside Noongar elders, scientists, and designers. Ten years in the making, it offers a pause in a rapidly growing city to sit with place and our urban wilderness.

"Layer by layer, map by map, story by story, this project reveals that Perth is a wonder land.

Perth lights up the national map of biodiversity. The ancient dunes, woodlands, claypans, and forests continue to weave through today’s city, sustained by a rich tapestry of wetlands and deep aquifers that give life to a place that is old and young, wet and dry, megadiverse and mega-endemic. 

The Perth region contains more than 2,000 native plant species, part of the south west floristic region containing around 40% of Australia’s recorded floral biodiversity (more than 9,000 of 24,000 taxa).

Perth also lights up the global map of biodiversity. Perth is a hotspot city within a global biodiversity hotspot, one of 36 regions worldwide, where immense biodiversity is in conflict with human impacts. The designation of hotspot has a double meaning, an accolade but more critically a warning: here, human impacts are in conflict with an epicentre of international ecological significance. The most severe of these impacts in the Perth region is urbanisation: an entrenched and orthodox ‘business-as-usual’ mode of designing and planning."

Mapping and Country

Mapping has been a constant thread across this decade of work: learning how to communicate with maps to the community at large, about the city, forests, or tides, but also how to communicate to different audiences: planners, developers, land managers, loggers, scientists, and designers. It takes a lot of seeing and re-seeing to communicate something clearly. Wonder Land is indebted to an ongoing engagement with Geographic Information Systems (GIS), and terabytes of data. It is filled with exercises of compilation, geospatial questioning, layering, and scale-shifting. Letting maps teach, devise, and generate. Design processes have sprung from mapping processes. Gathering data, updating data, overlaying data. Making new observations.

In deep, wondering if others have found the same patterns? Seen the pasts, futures, and presents revealed in the maps? Maps have given much energy to this work, and so has my growing critique of them.

Yule

At Yule, a hotspot within the hotspot, we are walking through deep time. Buttery, emerald, and hazel hues paint a gradient between dunal rises and claypan flats. At our feet, the thick crust of land is smudged by fungi and water. The crust swells and dries with the seasons, and with the aquifer, a microcosm of the tapestries of streams and wetlands across the whole of this Boodjar / land. We see scratchings of quendas around mats of thousands of tiny flowers. Native bees hover around braided drosera beneath old growth shrublands. Against the sun, the ngoolark / Carnaby’s black cockatoos screech and flicker, perching with the banksia. The Kartamoarnda / Darling Scarp presses down over this landscape and feeds it with water, reminding us that the flows are deep and wide.

The Yule flows from Jerban / Lesmurdie Falls at the edge of Kartamoarnda / Darling Scarp and the Yilgarn, to the Djarlgarro / Canning River. Over 10 kilometres, the Yule makes up a 702-hectare corridor, an area of ongoing community advocacy for a future Yule Brook Regional Park. 

Along the Yule, five of the six grounds of the Deep framework meet: Kartamoarnda; Bilya; Moorn; Mundjit; and a relic of Joondal, white rocks far from the coast that create a chalky coastal shrubland. Igneous rocks (Kartamoarnda) meet claypans (Moorn), leached white-grey sands (Mundjit) meet ages of river flows (Bilya). The Kartamoarnda grounds are part of the Yilgarn, the oldest landscape in the world. The Mundjit and Moorn along the Yule are relatively young, though still ancient.

On Perth's oldest dune, an assemblage of ecological communities has established over two million years. Where these many grounds meet, through deep time, biodiversity skyrockets.

Yule contains almost half of the species of the Perth region in less than one percent of the area. Yule is home to claypans, herblands, sedgelands, and banksia woodlands comprising dozens of deep grounds and ecologies which reveal themselves in the Deep framework. There are 857 endemic species of flora in the Yule corridor, 58 rare and threatened flora, and 11 federally listed threatened ecological communities. In this corridor, there are 36 carnivorous plant species, far more than in the whole of Europe, and an estimated 80 species of native bee. The Deep map of Yule shows these rich and continuous ecologies lighting up the Deep framework of the Perth region. 

The Surface map of Yule situates it within the green and blue structures of the Perth region. Yule is composed of many natures: deep ecologies, urban canopy, novel ecosystems, terrains vague, recreation, lawns, ex-agricultural land, brooks and open drainage systems.

This is a modified and diverse urban nature matrix surrounding a deeply continuous and megadiverse landscape core.

"Wonder Land asks you to re-see Perth as a city within a wondrous environment. By engaging with the many dimensions of biodiversity, water, and landscape, this thesis reveals the multivalency of this place. Wonder Land dives through many maps, many voices, and many natures. It assembles two landscape frameworks for Perth called the Deep framework and Surface framework. These are frameworks for nature; representational and directive; live and implementable. They are lenses for re-seeing place, and guides for designing and planning with place. If followed, they would transform Perth’s relationship to place. The frameworks demonstrate a new hierarchy of planning concerns that foregrounds landscape. ...New hierarchies and actions led by landscape are necessary and long overdue. This region—and many others—now critically depend upon it.”

Daniel Jan Martin is Lecturer in Landscape Architecture at The University of Western Australia and founder of the local landscape practice Super Natural. Wonder Land is an upcoming publication. His other recent work, Forests Atlas, delves into the south west forests with Noongar Elder Dr Noel Nannup OAM and creative collaborators. The Forests Atlas is available here. 

A huge thanks to Daniel Jan Martin for sharing this work with Wilderness Journal.

A letter from a reader 

Blue-Banded Bees and Bush Basil in the city by Renata Atkin

A friend gave me a cutting from a pot plant grown from a cutting she had received from another friend. The plant is the native bush basil (Plectranthus graveolens), an aromatic herb, with a blue salvia-like flower. Bush basil grows easily from cuttings. You can cut a tip off, pop it in some soil and usually within a week or two you have good root growth. Now I have pots of it everywhere in my urban Surry Hills terrace garden. My neighbourhood is dominated by street plantings and small front gardens of succulents and agapanthus, which are not well suited to bees of any kind. 

When my pots of bush basil started to flower, bees very quickly started to appear from somewhere. They were very speedy bees so I could not quite see what sort of bees they were. I tried to photograph them but they were just a small blur across the photo but I was sure I had seen some iridescent blue. The mystery was solved one evening when I saw a group of bees lined up on a leafless branch. They were male blue-banded bees (Amegilla cingulata). In the evening, the male blue-banded bees gather together in groups of up to 25. Their bachelor pad is a branch or a stick which they hang onto with their mandibles. I check on them every night and now, during the day, I search for the females who must be somewhere nearby digging their nests with their jaws and setting up cells with pollen and nectar for their eggs. I only have a few weeks left to find them as they only live until about April. The eggs in the nests will lay dormant until the weather warms up again in October. I will have my pots of bush basil ready and waiting.—Renata Atkin, Sydney

Thank you to Renata and, dear readers, if you would like to write us a letter, please do.  

From the archives: a ferry tale

Photographs and story by Dean Sewell

Independent campaigners grab national headlines with an audacious protest at the launch of the new Sydney-Tasmania ferry in 2004.

The Wilderness Society campaign centres in Australia's major cities have harnessed urban support for protecting far-flung wilderness areas such as western Tasmania, Kakadu, Cape York and the Kimberley. The dramatic protest shown below was not carried out by the Wilderness Society itself, but by a group of audacious fellow campaigners determined to take the plight of Tasmania's forests to a national stage.
 
Photographer Dean Sewell recalls what happened after the event: "When the boys were released upon processing from the water police, we met at the pub near the Rocks for a congratulatory beer, Alex simply wrote out a cheque for $6,000 (they were each fined $1,500 under some archaic maritime law) stating 'that action alone would amount to six months of ordinary campaigning'."