SEVERAL mature trees used by endangered black cockatoos are to be felled, to make way for an upgrade of the Reid Highway/Malaga Drive interchange in Bayswater. The marri trees on Malaga Drive, just outside Lightning Park, are used by the native cockatoos for feeding and form part of their rapidly diminishing WA flight corridor. When…

THE closing of the North Perth KFC (Kentucky Fried Chicken for the old-timers) sparked an unofficial rave in the carpark to see off the grease hut with a few chicken dances. Organisers Get Weird, an incomprehensible organisation hosting quasi-monthly parties “for cool kids and people that like to rave in bathrooms,” sent the word out…

THE fight for the future of Charles Street saw a score of residents front a development assessment panel meeting to see off a 93-unit block planned for their street. The DAP unanimously rejected Salomone Projects’ $28 million plan, saying it was too tall and bulky Vincent mayor John Carey said the big problem was “the…

IT could be rubber duckies at dawn as the Swan River Trust and Bayswater city council go prow-to-prow over dinghies. Boat owners at Clarkson Reserve use the dinghies to get to their vessels and unofficially store them on the foreshore, often chaining them to the fence of the Maylands boat yard. The SRT says dragging…

THE world of alternative games developers lives in the shadows of once-in-a-blue-moon success stories like Minecraft (creator Markus Persson sold it for a tidy $2.5 billion). Far more common are tales of developers labouring in garages on lines of code for hundreds of hours, only for the end result to make hardly a ripple in…

BAYSWATER city council is considering spending up to $93,000 to beautify artificial lakes in Maylands that have become an eyesore. Bungana and Brearley lakes were constructed from abandoned claypits, excavated during the operation of the Maylands brick kiln. The lakes were part of a 300-property residential development in the late 1990s, designed to improve the…

A 10-year-old Inglewood boy has drawn up plans for a hoverboard, inspired not by Back to the Future II re-runs but a quantum levitation exhibit at Scitech. After getting home and sketching out detailed schematics, Brandon Boylen wrote to Scitech asking where he could find the right materials (20 super-strong magnets, a metre-long ceramic board…