Clever designers, a council with foresight and many willing hands have set out to transform a bare patch of Dubbo into a $10-million green oasis and a regional jewel.
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Dubbo City Council has recommitted to the Elizabeth Park Regional Botanic Gardens and the hundreds of species of plants and animals that could one day capture a comparative number of tourists.
The 10 hectares that was once a paddock already boast the Shoyoen Japanese Garden and Biodiversity Garden, but those havens are just the start.
The council’s revised master plan for Elizabeth Park, on the corner of Birch Avenue and Windsor Parade, has ambitions for a dry rainforest and centre with gallery, cafe, education space and more within 10 years.
The vision comes with a hefty price tag but the council has shown its determination to build the gardens, rock by rock and plant by plant, without undue burden on Dubbo ratepayers.
It secured $458,000 from the federal government for a sensory garden, about 80 per cent of which stayed in the city’s economy by engaging local contractors.
It has submitted grant applications for two more sections of the gardens complex.
The timetable of the works are weather-dependent and despite recent rain Elizabeth Park is starting to be the three-dimensional representation of the paper plans and council’s horticultural services manager Ian McAlister knows both, centimetre by centimetre.
“It’s absolutely fantastic, I’m really enjoying the challenge,” Mr McAlister said.
“You don’t often get a chance to work on such a large project.”
The council adopted LandPlan Studio’s original master plan for the development of Elizabeth Park into a regional botanic garden in 1998.
LandPlan Studio revised the master plan this year to include enhancements to its visitor and environmental credentials.
A botanic garden is primarily a specialised park or passive recreation area where visitors can appreciate the botanical values of plants and their use in ornamental horticulture.
Importantly, it also provides facilities for environmental education and specialised botanic and horticultural research.
Elizabeth Park would be a significant regional botanic garden despite its small size because Dubbo is located within the southern extent of the Brigalow Belt South bioregion and close to three other bioregions.
Botanic gardens can have numerous short- and long-term benefits, broadly categorised as environmental, community, economic and political.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has given the council reason to believe the economic benefits could really bloom.
The ABS recorded that in 1994-95 38.5 per cent of people aged 15 and older visited a botanic garden at least once in the past 12 months. About 31 per cent of regional residents visited a botanic garden at least once a year and botanic gardens were the second most popular cultural venue visited after the cinema, according to the ABS.
It was likely the figures remained largely unchanged since then, according to the LandPlan master plan. If Elizabeth Park enticed visitors to Dubbo to stay an extra night or buy another meal, it would be a good outcome, Mr McAlister said.
The botanic gardens would operate within a network of similar attractions across the region including the Warrumbungle Aboriginal Site Tour, Bird Routes of Baradine and the Pilliga, Gilgandra Flora Reserve, Mount Kaputar National Park and the Siding Spring Observatory.
The council has drawn on the project’s potential to pursue $100,000 under the federal government grant program TQUAL - Tourism Quality Projects.
If successful, these funds will go towards the construction of the Centre of Excellence building, which would house the information area, gallery and cafe.
The 10-year development timetable is dependent on the council securing external funding and a revision of the funding and timetable will be carried out in 2016-17.
“We want to use non-rate revenue as much as possible,” Mr McAlister said.
