Dear Echo News,
How to turn an iconic piece of WA history into gaudy, showy, tacky trash! The West Australian postal service has been in existence since December 1829 shortly after the British settlement of the Swan River Colony. A very important and simple way of communicating domestically and internationally and is something which we all take for granted which is all but superseded these days. It is for this reason I think we should educate our younger generation on our historic past. Vintage red pillar post boxes are a very important part of our history and should be preserved as close to their original state as possible and it is for this reason WA heritage council has listed four on their inHerit site under ‘Red Post Boxes Group’. Here in Bassendean, we have the oldest continuously used red pillar post box in WA ‘VR1876’ which celebrates its 150th anniversary this year and so the reason why Australia Post removed the box and sent to eastern states for ‘specialist restoration’ so it would look its finest for celebrations and commemorations later in the year which was recently returned. All I can say is perhaps Aust Post should stick to delivering letters and parcels as they have not much of a clue about history. The pillar box now looks like something you would buy from Temu at Christmas time, crass and artificial looking, tacky and has lost all of its simple unique authentic historic charm! Our red pillar post box is now red, green and an abundance of gaudy gold. What an embarrassment! West Australian vintage post boxes are small simple and elegant and not showy and tacky like their east coast counterparts. Do your homework Australia Post!
G Coleman
Bassendean
--------------------------------------------------------------------Dear Echo News,
Thank you for your article Proposed new data centre comes under fire (Echo News, March 6) alerting the public to the proposed industrial building of a $600 million data centre facility on the bank of the Helena River in Hazelmere. Incredulously this noisy and imposing proposed location is next to a school to the west and an environmentally sensitive area to the north. It is the height of an eight-storey residential building and the noise from 64 evaporatively cooled chillers running 24/7 will destroy the amenity of this environmentally and culturally sensitive area. It’s important to understand that whilst the City of Swan will not be the decision maker for this application, city planning staff prepare a Recommended Authority Report (RAR) for JDAP to consider as part of their determination. Therefore, we encourage the public to urge the City of Swan to use their own guidelines to interrogate the enormous scale of this application and to ask our JDAP council representatives (councillors Henderson, Zannino and Congerton) to object to this proposal. The proposal fails on issues of noise pollution, energy consumption and air pollution, water consumption and waste water, impact on Aboriginal heritage, inconsistency with the Hazelmere Enterprise Area Structure Plan, clearing of mature trees including old growth local native species and being of no benefit to the local community (despite the obvious impacts on the electricity grid, water consumption, noise, the discharge of waste water into a conservation category wetland, clearing of trees and loss of amenity, etc). For further info break down please see Blackadder Woodbridge Catchment Group posts on social media. The application is exactly the sort of conflicting land use that the City of Swan’s Hazelmere Enterprise Area Structure Plan (HEASP) was designed to avoid. The intent of the HEASP is clearly set out on page 1:“HEA Structure Plan seeks to simultaneously facilitate appropriate industrial growth whilst protecting sensitive wetlands, ground and surface water and surrounding residents.” Section 7.2 “Design Philosophy” includes the following objectives: “Create land use interface that safe guards the quality of life for landowners and surrounding residents” and “Minimise environmental impacts and strengthen ecological links through the locality”. Also, it has been a very short time frame for the public to respond to this application; we hope the City of Swan will extend the public consultation period rather than another disastrous development application slipping through to JDAP that the public are unaware of. Any member of the public can submit their views to the City of Swan and councillors, and you can make a two minute submission at the JDAP hearing, but by then it will be too late!
F Irwin Blackadder
Woodbridge Catchment Group
