00:00 There are a couple of reasons around this. Firstly, just from the idea of the lawn that
00:05 we kind of all grew up with, that idea of the beautiful green carpet. It's water intensive
00:11 and in a city like Perth, for example, very dry city, that equates to gigalitres of drinkable
00:17 water going onto our lawns for maintenance only, for aesthetic reasons only every year.
00:22 There's that side, pesticides, and we've got to encourage more diversity in our ecologies
00:26 and lawns as we know them tend to do the opposite of that and tend to sort of become a monoculture.
00:31 So from that side, they're the reasons we should be thinking differently about what
00:34 ground cover might look like. Very different image to the kind of lawn we all grew up with.
00:39 I like my lawn a lot. I'm going to put that out there straight away. I do spend a lot
00:43 of time on it, but it is a pain as we were just chatting about before we got this segment
00:47 started. Because in Canberra, where I live, it's usually too hot, too cold, and it's rarely
00:52 just right for lawn growing conditions. And some people around my area have been putting
00:57 in fake lawns. Some of them look quite good, but you don't like them either, do you?
01:02 No, this is the surprise to me. I thought fake lawns or AstroTurf was the villain in
01:09 all of this. But it turns out that it's real lawns as well are sustainably troubling or
01:14 problematic. But yes, no, the AstroTurf, the fake lawns, they have all the same and even
01:19 worse environmental credentials. So the problem I see there is I was standing on a lot recently
01:25 in the outskirts of Melbourne, seeing a whole street of AstroTurf lie down the footpath.
01:30 And for two metres by the width of the block, that is what is being sort of laid out in
01:35 a lot of our new subdivisions. That's very concerning.
01:38 It's hot, isn't it?
01:39 That's right. It takes the heat, it keeps the heat to the point where in a very hot
01:43 summer's day, you can't actually walk on it.
01:45 I've walked on it before and burned my feet next to a footpath. Right. OK. So if you don't
01:50 have a lawn, you can't put in AstroTurf, or at least you shouldn't be. What should you
01:54 put in instead?
01:55 Now, this is where it gets interesting, because there is a real challenge to landscape architects,
02:00 designers, architects, all the rest who are now trying to rethink what ground cover might
02:04 look like. So things like hardier walkable surfaces like dichondria or even mint, for
02:11 example, are being considered as viable alternatives to keep a kind of a space that's open, that's
02:17 green. But there's other trends to rewilding more meadow like types of lawn spaces. So
02:23 the alternatives are definitely there and we should not be sacrificing our green space.
02:28 It's just that the nature of that green space is changing.
02:30 OK. There will be some people watching this this morning concerned that the great Aussie
02:35 backyard is under threat, sporting matches. What on earth will this trend mean for Australia's
02:40 cricket team if we don't have backyard lawns? If we didn't have lawns, though, do you think
02:45 we might appreciate our local parks and sporting fields a bit more like you see in other nations
02:50 around the world where housing is a lot smaller?
02:52 Look, I think that's kind of the silver lining to all of this. I realise how difficult an
02:58 image this is to kind of give up the idea of the Aussie backyard. And I'm not advocating
03:02 for that at all. But the reality is that those spaces are being sort of designed away in
03:08 our new subdivisions and so on. Lot sizes are shrinking, house sizes are staying the
03:11 same or getting bigger. So they're kind of already going away, which means then the value
03:16 of our public parks, those common green spaces that we all have, that's even more valuable.
03:21 We kind of know they're precious, but I think we have to sort of look at them with fresh
03:25 eyes and think actually they are what for most people growing up in the next generations
03:29 of Australia, they will be the only source of real green usable space that they can get
03:34 to.
03:35 Well Anthony Burke, I really enjoyed your article on the ABC website this week. If you
03:38 haven't seen it, you should go and look at it. Thought provoking. Not sure whether I'm
03:42 ready to give up my - it's only a little patch of lawn - I'm not sure whether I'm ready to
03:45 give it up.
03:46 Fair enough.
03:47 Totally honest. But it's a good thing to think about.
03:48 [BLANK_AUDIO]
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