1Welcome to all of you.
2Can everybody see and hear me?
3Good. I'm Sally, your guide for this tour of the Bicentennial Park.
4I hope that you're all wearing your most comfortable shoes and that you can keep up the pace.
5So let's get under way on our tour around this wonderful park.
6I'll start today with some general background information.
7There used to be a lot of factories in this area until the 1960s.
8Creating the park required the demolition of lots of derelict buildings on the site,
9so most of the exciting park space all around you was originally warehouses and storehouses.
10The idea of building a public park here
11was first discussed when a property developer proposed a high-rise housing development,
12but the local community wasn't happy.
13If the land was to be cleaned up,
14they wanted to use the site for recreation.
15Residents wanted open space for outdoor activities,
16rather than housing or even an indoor sports complex.
17Now, to the Bicentennial Park itself.
18It has two areas,
19a nature reserve and a formal park with man-made features and gardens.
20The tall blue-and-white building in front of us is called The Tower
21and is the centre point for the formal gardens.
22It stands twelve metres high,
23so, follow me up the stairs to where we can take advantage of the fantastic views.
24Well, here we are at the top of The Tower,
25and we're going to look at the view from each direction.
26Out to the east, the large buildings about a kilometre away are on the Olympic site.
27There's an indoor arena for gymnastics,
28a stadium for track and field
29and a swimming pool for races and synchronised swimming and also diving.
30If you look carefully down there,
31you can see the train lines.
32The Olympic site has its own station to encourage the use of public transport.
33There is also a car park, but it only holds a limited number of cars.
34The formal park has some specially-created water features.
35If you look out here to the south, you can see a circular ornamental pond.
36And around to the west,
37you can relax and sit on a bench to smell the flowers in the rose garden,
38and finally up to the north, if you look in front of you now,
39there's a lake with a small island in the centre,
40you can hire rowing boats at the boat shed, which you can't see from here,
41but if you look through the trees, you can see the café,
42which has lovely views across the water.
43Okay, let's climb down now.
44We will go now and have a look at the nature reserve section of the park,
45which has opened up natural wetland to the public.
46The Mangroves have been made more accessible to visitors by the boardwalk built during the park's upgrade.
47You'd think that people would come here to look at the unusual plant life of the area,
48but in fact, it's more often used for cycling and is very popular with the local clubs.
49This is the far end of the park
50and over there you can see the Frog Pond,
51a natural feature here long before the park was designed.
52Just next to it we have our outdoor classroom,
53a favourite spot for school parties.
54The area is now most often used by primary schools for biology lessons.
55And finally let's pass by the Waterbird Refuge.
56This area is in a sheltered part of the estuary,
57that's why the park's viewing shelter is a favourite spot for bird watchers who can use it to spy through binoculars.
58You can watch a variety of water birds,
59but most visitors expect to see black swans when they come to the shelter.
60You might spot one yourself right now!
61Well, here we are back at our starting point...