| Welcome to all of you. |
| Can everybody see and hear me? |
| Good. I'm Sally, your guide for this tour of the Bicentennial Park. |
| I hope that you're all wearing your most comfortable shoes and that you can keep up the pace. |
| So let's get under way on our tour around this wonderful park. |
| I'll start today with some general background information. |
| There used to be a lot of factories in this area until the 1960s. |
| Creating the park required the demolition of lots of derelict buildings on the site, |
| so most of the exciting park space all around you was originally warehouses and storehouses. |
| The idea of building a public park here |
| was first discussed when a property developer proposed a high-rise housing development, |
| but the local community wasn't happy. |
| If the land was to be cleaned up, |
| they wanted to use the site for recreation. |
| Residents wanted open space for outdoor activities, |
| rather than housing or even an indoor sports complex. |
| Now, to the Bicentennial Park itself. |
| It has two areas, |
| a nature reserve and a formal park with man-made features and gardens. |
| The tall blue-and-white building in front of us is called The Tower |
| and is the centre point for the formal gardens. |
| It stands twelve metres high, |
| so, follow me up the stairs to where we can take advantage of the fantastic views. |
| Well, here we are at the top of The Tower, |
| and we're going to look at the view from each direction. |
| Out to the east, the large buildings about a kilometre away are on the Olympic site. |
| There's an indoor arena for gymnastics, |
| a stadium for track and field |
| and a swimming pool for races and synchronised swimming and also diving. |
| If you look carefully down there, |
| you can see the train lines. |
| The Olympic site has its own station to encourage the use of public transport. |
| There is also a car park, but it only holds a limited number of cars. |
| The formal park has some specially-created water features. |
| If you look out here to the south, you can see a circular ornamental pond. |
| And around to the west, |
| you can relax and sit on a bench to smell the flowers in the rose garden, |
| and finally up to the north, if you look in front of you now, |
| there's a lake with a small island in the centre, |
| you can hire rowing boats at the boat shed, which you can't see from here, |
| but if you look through the trees, you can see the café, |
| which has lovely views across the water. |
| Okay, let's climb down now. |
| We will go now and have a look at the nature reserve section of the park, |
| which has opened up natural wetland to the public. |
| The Mangroves have been made more accessible to visitors by the boardwalk built during the park's upgrade. |
| You'd think that people would come here to look at the unusual plant life of the area, |
| but in fact, it's more often used for cycling and is very popular with the local clubs. |
| This is the far end of the park |
| and over there you can see the Frog Pond, |
| a natural feature here long before the park was designed. |
| Just next to it we have our outdoor classroom, |
| a favourite spot for school parties. |
| The area is now most often used by primary schools for biology lessons. |
| And finally let's pass by the Waterbird Refuge. |
| This area is in a sheltered part of the estuary, |
| that's why the park's viewing shelter is a favourite spot for bird watchers who can use it to spy through binoculars. |
| You can watch a variety of water birds, |
| but most visitors expect to see black swans when they come to the shelter. |
| You might spot one yourself right now! |
| Well, here we are back at our starting point... |