(Goodings: … Jayne Stinson … this is a story that ended up with a really happy ending.)
… we had a terrific day yesterday, a couple of hundred locals from the Edwardstown area rocked up at what’s now called The Pines … Angus calling that name for it and these are bike jumps that … Angus … has been making by hand, himself, for many years since he was just 11 and what happened … last year … they came under threat, it looked like they were going to get bulldozed, and Angus … rallied 1,000 signatures on a petition … and I got involved as well … and that saw us go to Parliament, table that petition, put some pressure on the Minister – you guys did your bit as well, so thank you so much for that – and we managed to save the jumps but he didn’t stop there. He kept pushing to make the area as good as it could possibly be and if you go down there now you’ll see there’s a pretty awesome tool cabinet that all his tools, which have been donated to him, are now kept in, there’s seating and bird boxes that the kids at St Anthony’s Primary School decorated, there’s gardens and planter boxes and pathways and of course there’s now some warning signage saying ride at your own risk if you’re going to be using the jumps.
(Penberthy: …how did we get to this position … it seems to be an evil three-way combination of personal injury lawyers, accrual accountant working for insurance companies and Local Government narks that have conspired to oversee what you could broadly describe as ‘the death of fun’?)
… I got told it’s got to come down because all the neighbours are complaining about it, all the neighbours are saying it’s so messy and it’s so unsafe and it has to come down but it took me a little while but I figured out there was one complaint – one person complained, and I got an avalanche of parents saying … you can’t destroy this, my kids love it, they go down there, help out Angus, have a ride and this has existed in some form for quite some time … certainly more than ten or fifteen years … nothing quite as extravagant as what Angus has managed to achieve with his junior engineering skills … it just snowballed into something and everyone was so worried about the risk that they didn’t actually see the real risk is … kids not having somewhere to play and end up being inside in iPads which is what we’re all constantly complaining about.
(Goodings: … thank you for that …)