A neighbourhood celebration and walking tour

On Sunday 19 October 2014, we held a neighbourhood celebration at Coon Island.
We wanted to let people know about our group and our action plan, encourage neighbours to meet each other, and to highlight a natural and cultural treasure in our backyard.

We had a lovely morning, starting with a brief bit of history about the Sustainable Neighbourhoods program in our area.
Keith and Noel from the Coon Island Landcare group then each lead groups on a walking tour along Swansea Channel, highlighting some of the fascinating features of Coon Island.  Did you know:
  • The island was named after Herbert "Coon" Heaney, who was the first person to live permanently on the island in 1915.
  • Residents lived on the island in about 50 houses from 1915 until the early 1990s.
  • In the early days, most residents were miners from the Hunter coalfields who lost their jobs and houses in the mine lockouts in the 1920s and the Depression in the 1930s.
  • Coon Island has varied vegetation communities from Salt Marsh, to Grey Mangrove Shrubland, to Swamp Oak Forest.
  • The mangrove and saltmarsh area of Coon Island provide
    important food and breeding grounds for fish, crabs and
    other estuarine invertebrates.
  • The site is plentiful in birdlife, providing habitat to forest
    dwellers like Pardalotes and small Honeyeaters as well as to water-birds like the White-faced Heron.
  • The Coon Island Management Board commenced work in
    1991, with members of the Board forming a Landcare group to specifically manage natural areas of the site.
  • Team Leader Keith Graham and his team work every Tuesday on the Coon Island site. The group completes around 80 hours of work per month.
  • The Landcare group have transformed a degraded area into a beautiful passive recreation area for public use for picnics, walks, fishing and other activities, and have increased the health of Lake Macquarie after reducing run-off and stabilising banks through the planting of more than 1000 native trees.

Along the walk we conducted an Eco Angel Clean Up, and picked up 60kg of litter!

And once we got to the viewing platform, we got stuck into planting 200 native foreshore plants including to hold the soil and improve habitat.

With all that work done, we converged back at the picnic area for a sausage sizzle, a chance to chat with our neighbours, and to share ideas about future projects.

Thank you to everyone who attended, and who helped to promote the event, set everything up, led tours and activities, picked up litter and planted trees, cooked the BBQ, and helped pack up.  What a great team!
Here's some photos from the day:
Find out more:
Caves Beach Swansea Area Sustainable Neighbourhood Group
Coon Island Landcare Group, and Lakeside Drive Landcare Group
Eco Angel Clean Ups