Playgrounds and Parks

Australians take leisure very seriously, and they back that up by funding well-maintained, huge, and many nice parks.  Some are called "reserves," others "parks," and I think the difference is that reserves are just big undeveloped grassy pieces of land, whereas parks have soccer or footy or rugby fields or playgrounds.  (note:  soccer is soccer, footy is Australian rules football, rugby and footy are NOT the same, and American football is, well, not played here.)

We have three parks with small playgrounds within a few blocks of our house.  The one closest to our house slopes down on all sides into a huge cricket oval.  There is a pitch in the center, but we see all sorts of kids kicking balls around, and adults walking or running around the edge of the oval.  Dog owners seem to be able to let their dogs go off the leash in the oval as well, as long as there's no cricket being played.  I like this park because if we're playing in the oval, there is no way kids' toys can accidentally go in the street.  It's a good place for stomp rockets.

The playgrounds are often fenced, and there are huge signs up saying "no dogs in the playground" and "no smoking within 10 m. of the playground".  There's a variety of different equipment at each, but monkey bars and flying foxes seem to be very popular.  I've found a working water fountain at every decent-sized park.




There's a huge park called Wattle Park that's a 20 minute walk from our house.  They claim to have over 12,000 wattle trees in the park.  We walked there a couple days ago, but the playgrounds were old and a little lame.  The walking paths were terrific, though, and they also had a golf course, and of course a cafe where you could have a coffee. 

Joel remembers lots of happy times as a child messing around in the woods and streams in Wattle Park.  The park had a sign up that said, "Healthy Parks, Healthy Australians."   It's nice the government puts their money where their mouths are and supports the park system so well.

The park we went to today was closer to my mother-in-law's house than our house, but it had an incredible cable climbing apparatus, and the longest flying fox I've seen here so far.   They also had netball courts, soccer (or rugby) fields, and a cricket oval, as far as I could figure out.  Huge, really nice park.

Almost all parks have public toilets (no portapotties - hooray!)  They are clean enough not to give me the heebie-jeebies, and I found the technology pretty impressive.

At school playgrounds, most schools subscribe to the "Sunsmart" program (preventing sunburn and thus skin cancer), so they have shaded play areas.  Kids at a Sunsmart school are not allowed to play outside without a hat during first and fourth terms of school.  Skin cancer is a huge problem in Australia; Joel's already found himself very busy at work because of this.