UAMBI – A REMNANT CULTURAL LANDSCAPE IN SUBURBAN HEATHMONT
About
SELF- DRIVE: WALK & TALK
COST: FREE
LEADERS: Trevor Pitkin, AGHS Committee member, and a Trust for Nature representative
Please note that the meeting place is at the southern end of The Boulevarde and Allans Road
Uambi is a site in two distinct, but blended parts - the conserved ecosystem managed by Trust For Nature since 1980, and the stages of sympathetic settlement by several generations of the Harper family since 1940. Trevor Pitkin will present the historical background, and then a TFN representative will lead us across the site.
Uambi is one of the few remnants of the bushland that existed before European arrival. The bush reserve, while not apparently used for agriculture, has been altered along the way. Railways and drainage works inside the reserve, (undetectable today), posed risks to its retention as a representative ecosystem. Heathmont has undergone several phases of post-European development, starting with a wave of orchard growers taking almost all the land, then the residential sprawl supplanting these farms, and reaching its present state of a richly vegetated suburb among the foothills of the Dandenongs. All up, Uambi is a cultural landscape with many stories to tell.
BYO: Lunch, (note no picnic ground or toilets) or go to a nearby café in Canterbury Rd shopping strip, water bottle, suitable shoes for garden paths.
Location
Uambi Reserve Trust for Nature
The Boulevarde & Allens Rds intersection, Heathmont