Perth Voice Interactive

THE North Perth primary school olive harvest has become a treasured annual tradition and the kids will be back out on April 23 and 24 picking fruit from local neighbourhood trees to make olive oil for their P&C fundraiser.

Last year 1.34 tonne of fruit was squeezed to create 700 bottles of oil.

Ingrid Magtengaard from the P&C says they’re not expecting such a bumper crop this time round because fruit seems a bit smaller: the upside is smaller fruit “does make for a better quality olive oil”.

Given they’ve already won a silver medal at the Royal Show, they’re excited for a shot at gold.

The school always has more trees than pickers so if you’re keen to volunteer contact Ms Magtengaard on imagtengaard@amnet.net.au or just take in your picked olives the North Perth primary school on the verandah of the arts building (on Olive Street, sure enough).

by DAVID BELL

PERTH city councillor Lily Chen has been endorsed by the Liberal party to contest Mirrabooka at next year’s state election. Labor’s Janine Freeman holds the seat with a 4.6 per cent margin. Announcing her candidacy on Facebook, Ms Chen says, “it is a very marginal seat but I love challenges”. “I treasure the opportunity the Liberal party gave to me and I will do my best with all of your support to win this seat and to serve the community I am related to,” the councillor and lawyer says, noting her first family home was in the area and one of her offices is out that way too. The Liberals confirmed that incumbent MPs will recontest their seats in Perth (Eleni Evangel), Mt Lawley (Michael Sutherland) and Morley (Ian Britza).

IT might look like the line outside an Apple store the night before a slightly larger iPhone gets released, but this is just the crowd at the Vincent native plant sale on the weekend. It was a bumper turnout this year with 252 people buying plants (up from 172 a year ago). Mayor John Carey says “it’s going gangbusters… it has been the biggest turnout to date, we think that’s because it coincides with the city’s Adopt-a-Verge program”. That was an idea he had a couple years back where the council would grade and mulch a verge, then give residents vouchers for 20 free native plants and then let them look after their new verge garden (other residents get tubestock plants on the super cheap). It’s been so popular there’s now a big waiting list to get the verge done, so Mr Carey says the council’s going to look at expanding the budget to get to more people. As to why so many people are preferring native verges over the old English rose gardens, Mr Carey says “I think there’s a realisation that it’s so critical to making our neighbourhoods genuinely liveable. They want their verges to be green and to beautify the street but it’s also [because] with growing density our verges are another important green space.”

THE Beaufort Street festival might’ve packed it in and the Angove Street festival has been delayed for at least a year, but the Mt Hawthorn Streets and Laneways festival will roll on in 2016. At its debut last year more than 35,000 turned out to the event put together by the Mt Hawthorn hub. While Beaufort Street trended towards a big music festival that saw massive numbers pack the street (up to 160,000 in its final year), Mt Hawthorn goes for a more boutique-village style festival. This year it’ll have Ladybird Lane with 40 WA female artisans spruiking wares.The Mt Hawthorn traders are rolling street food out onto the pavement, and Greening Vincent is back to cater for all the area’s hippies and green thumbs. The free festival runs May 1, 11am to 7pm and there’s a full program at http://www.mthawthornhub.com.au

IN a sign of how deeply the end of WA’s mining boom is being felt, inner-city Perth suffered a 1.7 per cent rise in unemployment over the past year.

According to the federal employment department, Perth city started the year with a 5.8 per cent unemployment rate, close to the national average, but by January it had blown out to 7.5 per cent.

That tracks with rising office vacancy levels in the CBD, which earlier this week Deloitte Access Economics forecast would worsen.

“The office vacancy rate is already high and is set to get much worse over the next year as companies operating in the West strive to cut costs,” Deloitte director Chris Richardson said.

Despite his gloomy forecast, which included low expectations for a jobs recovery, WA’s overall unemployment rate appears to have stabilised at 6.1 per cent.

Senior economics lecturer at Murdoch University Anne Garnett says a big drop in commodity prices, particularly the floor falling out of iron ore, has been the culprit behind Perth’s pain.

“As WA supplies the majority of Australia’s iron ore exports, this has affected some mining operations significantly and they have been cutting costs by shedding labour.

“The real rate of unemployment is probably higher than the official statistics, as the participation rate has been falling in WA; it was 68.7 per cent in February 2015, and has dropped to 68.1 per cent in February 2016.

“This is a substantial drop and means that many people have given up looking for work and are no longer participating in the workforce.”

Over the same period that Perth’s unemployment rose, Stirling’s rose from 3.3 per cent to 4.5 per cent and Bayswater’s from 3.7 per cent to 4.6 per cent.

by STEVE GRANT

A BIZARRE sight has been greeting dog walkers down at Woodville Reserve in recent weeks, with two women carrying a portable fence while escorting people through the park.

It’s an art project in response to a story the Voice ran (“Pooch and shove,” January 14, 2016) about a bit of biffo down at the reserve. A woman had told us she was made to feel unwelcome by the regular dogwalking clique because her dog was snappy, and a bit of back and forth ended up with her being physically manhandled from the park.

Artists Simone Johnston and Tanya Lee aka ST Team spotted our article and developed the playful response to it.

They’ve been working with a group called International Art Space on a project called “Know thy Neighbour,” a series of arty public “interventions” about public and private space and urban politics. Curious ads have been popping up in the paper over recent months, their little call outs to the community based on something we’ve written.

Ms Lee explains “Pooch and shove was an article which mentioned that Woodville reserve had its own spatial politics–like any public space–sharing with lots of other people and animals can sometimes get problematic.

“So we decided in order to ‘solve’ the issue of badly behaved dogs and having to share the space with lots of other we would offer a dog-walking ferry service.”

They advertised the service in the paper and in nearby letterboxes then headed down to the park to test it out, ferrying people across the park in the high-vis fence structure.

“It was met with lots of laughter and we were delighted that so many dogs and their owners got involved. It was great to see the friendships that have developed there,” Ms Lee says. “Although this work we have been making is humorous we still feel like humour can be used to solve problems by generating discussion in a fun way. We wish the loving community at Woodville reserve and their furry companions all the best!”

As for other projects, keep an eye out for ads in the Voice that seem just a little out of place and follow the clues to see what ST Team is up to next.

by DAVID BELL

CITIZEN scientists are needed to help collect bird feathers in wetlands so regular scientists can build a “feather map” and figure out where birds are and how they’re coping with reduced river flows, flooding, drought, climate change and different land uses.

Waterbird expert Kate Brandis is heading up the project and says Perth’s great lakes are key waterbird sites, making them vital for the feather map.

The feather holds secrets about the bird’s diet and environmental conditions it’s been living in, like a “memory chip of where the bird’s been” that can be revealed through nuclear testing techniques: “The more feathers we have from diverse geographic areas, the more complete our feather map, and the clearer the picture of Australian waterbird health will be,” Dr Brandis says.

Inland wetlands are a big deal for waterbirds, providing their habitat for breeding, roosting and feeding, and if there aren’t flooded wetlands around the birds just won’t breed.

Along with giving an idea of what the birds are eating and the health of their wetlands, this research could answer whether birds practice “natal site fidelity”, meaning they go back to their birthplace to breed like salmon.

Head to www.feathermap.ansto.gov.au if you want to get your hands dirty and be a feather collector (although guidelines suggest you should probably wear gloves, and another tip is you shouldn’t take feathers from living birds, just to be crystal clear).

by DAVID BELL

FOR more than two months Ditte Eden’s family has been producing just one bag of rubbish a week.

The Mt Lawley family had been reducing its rubbish output for a while but recently, when Ms Eden’s partner, Merlin, prepared to take the Sulo out he found it was empty. That week’s waste was just a half-bag, still sitting in the bin under the sink.

Ms Eden says cutting rubbish was an organic process.

“We didn’t set any goals, it just kind of happened,” she told the Voice.

“When starting a family we got more into cleaning up our diet and getting rid of toxic chemicals and cleaning products in our house. And then one of the other things was plastic: I wanted plastic out of my life.”

Originally from Denmark, Ms Eden says, “I remember when I first came to Australia I read an article about an artist who hadn’t bought any bottles in a couple of years, and I thought ‘how do you do it?’” But now her family doesn’t drink soft drinks, cutting out plastic bottles, and keeps a few mason jars in the car to fill with coffee or smoothies instead of getting takeaway cups.

Composting takes care of most food waste, and buying fruits and vegies in a box from farmers’ markets means no styrofoam nor plastic packaging.

Using freecycle websites has helped Ms Eden offload things that might otherwise go in the bin: she listed online a broken radio that was junk to her, but it was quickly snapped up by someone who could either repair it or dismantle it for parts.

It’s not the only unorthodox measure the quirky family’s taken up: It’s also got rid of its couches, in line with ideas popularised by US biomechanist Katy Bowman, who says we should always be moving, readjusting and rebalancing to stay healthy and not sitting for hours in the same position on the couch.

Ms Eden’s hoping to inspire other people to cut down on their weekly rubbish quota too. She blogs all her tips at http://www.ditteeden.com

by DAVID BELL

THE humble Carmel Gym in Yokine was home to the Australian National Para Table Tennis Championships this week.  The Maccabi table tennis club hosted competitors with disabilities from Australia, Fiji, New Caledonia and New Zealand, as well as Thai medalist Rungroi Thainiyom who won gold at London in 2012.

There were wheelchair divisions, standing, deaf and for the first time a visually impaired event known as “Swish”. Developed for blind people, it’s a variation on the normal game with the ball being hit under the net: it has to travel along the surface of the table, and the ball has bells in it and is a little bigger. WA player Connor Johnstone won a gold, two silver and one bronze medal, and Lennard Properjohn picked up the junior male special perpetual award. And while the official team announcement’s still pending, five of the Australian athletes present have qualified for the Rio paralympics.