Urrbrae - Mid City Farm
With Keith ConlonA sheep stand, a piggery, a poultry farm, cattle and more in a priceless patch of more than a hundred acres of green and gold in the middle of Adelaide's dress circle suburbs... that's Urrbrae Agricultural High School. It is just eight kilometres from the GPO, spreading back from the corner of Fullarton Road and Cross Road, close to the foothills.
Some of the 800 secondary school students helped marshall their livestock for our Postcards visit. Suffolk sheep reluctantly mounted an inspection race, alpacas galloped into view with some tricky shepherding, and poll hereford nonchalantly walked through on leads. It was a good rehearsal for the Environment Expo and School Open Day next weekend, Friday 22 October to Sunday 24 October.
It looked like one of those tourism commercials. A British racing green MG-B cruised round a rural corner past gum trees and young horsewomen and headed up a track past a spring green vineyard. The scenery is pure Urrbrae Agricultural High School, and so is the MG-B. A group of year 11 students stripped it down and restored it to immaculate condition last year in the school's new Technology Centre. They're now selling raffle tickets for it to raise money for a new industrial lathe for the centre.
In one corner of the farm campus, the Urrbrae wetland has grown more attractive and more effective since its construction three years ago. Waterbirds, reed warblers and swallows have moved in permanently. The project was born of necessity. Two one metre diameter stormwater pipes bringing street flow down from the hillside suburbs meet here, and there had been a good chance of a local flood every four or five years. A flood control system alone was not possible, as Urrbrae benefactor Peter Waite's gift of land was for educational purposes. Thus was born the Urrbrae Wetland Education Centre, which has now welcomed about 7000 students and adults to discover how the ponding and plank and aquatic life works to clean up the stormwater before it heads for Gulf St Vincents.
Once the wetland is "cured" of an upstream catchment grease pollution source, it's planned to direct about a quarter of the stormwater flow back underground into the aquifer each year. It will then be pumped out through summer to irrigate the playing fields of neighbouring Unley High School and the Urrbrae campus. The Urrbrae wetland is much more than just a pretty pond, and it's open for group educational visits.
In 1997, Urrbrae began its Marsupial Club, designed to give students an opportunity to better understand Australian native endangered species by breeding and tending them. In a student designed and built nocturnal house, rabbit-sized long nosed poteroos hop. They are extinct in their original habitat, the state's South East.
A family of delicate, big-eyed sugar gliders nestle in a nesting box waiting for dark. Club members show visitors tiny fat tailed dunnarts, spinifex hopping mice, and plains rats, all part of their breeding program.
In the fenced feral free sanctuary, students bottle fed baby bettongs and ring tailed possums in warm cloth pouches. Predicably, this is a very popular section of the Urrbrae Trails program, which gives visiting primary school students a chance to experience agricultural and environment projects at the school. It was itself developed by year 10 students as a practical case-study in farm and environmental tourism.
Visitors might get a chance to hold a colourful breeding rooster in the poultry farm, as I did. They'll certainly see lots of chooks. Some are kept for free range eggs, while a couple of thousand broilers are sold for meat each year.
The aviary birds are a highlight, and the boer goats provide entertainment as they gambol and bunk, but the piggery was the most educational for me. We watched a dozen piglets less that half a day old feeding, endured a high volume of squeals of the breeding sows before our student assistants gave them a bucket of dry feed, and marvelled at the size of the boar.
The Urrbrae Trails are open by appointment during the school year, and for a couple of dollars they'll be open to all next weekend as Urrbrae hosts and extensive Environment Expo and opens its own doors for a school open day, with plenty of free entertainment and displays.
It is obviously a special school in more ways than one ... Urrbrae Agricultural High School.
Environment Expo '99
22-24 October, 1999Urrbrae Agricaltural High School
505 Fullarton Road
Netherby SA 5062Phone
(08) 8272 6955 Facsimile
(08) 8373 3043Website
www.urrbrae.org
Urrbrae@adelaide.on.net
