There's a lot that can be done on a neighbourhood level to clean up stormwater before it enters the stormwater pits and ends up in the Yarra. And one of the bonuses of treating and capturing stormwater is that one of the best ways to do it is to create nice lush green garden beds.
A lot of developers building new subdivisions out in Doreen or on the dry Western Plains, love treating stormwater because it's pretty much the only way they can create green public landscapes with current water restrictions. And really, it is crazy to let all that water drain directly into the Yarra when we could have it soaking into our soil right here.

The image above shows a section of Charlotte Street showing the existing road profile, and stormwater treatment. So basically the water runs over the road, picking up pollutants on the way, and then falls directly into the drain, where it flows on into the Yarra and does significant damage.

There's lots of ways to introduce stormwater treatment, and some of them require very little changes to the existing kerb and road layout - but the solution I've drawn up here is a little more elaborate.

What we could do is remove the kerbs altogether and allow the road and footpath surface to slope gently down to a vegetated swale (or mini wetland) on one side of the road . The green strappy leaved plants in the swale act to clean and filter the water before it reaches the drains (click here to see plan showing possible location of swale). We could store our stormwater in underground tanks so that we can use it for watering public landscapes. And the whole system can be designed so that in a storm event any overflow will be carried away by the existing stormwater infrastructure.

image of a stormwater treatment swale in the docklands from WSUD an organisation dealing with water sensitive urban design in Sydney, which provides lots of useful practical information.

I was sitting at home working a moment ago when I heard the sound of what I thought was a tennis ball hitting the window high up on the side of our house.

I looked up as a bird fell into the court yard, and I watched it as it lay on the ground where it landed and twitched a little before lying still. A indigenous Little Wattlebird, dead.

And I feel faintly ridiculous about this, but the bird dying has upset me a little. I'm not used to watching a creature die. And I'm not used to being confronted by my impact on the natural world as directly as this.

This whole blog is supposed to be about how to make my neighbourhood more ecologically sustainable, but for this bird the fact my house existed at all, with it's unnatural glass surfaces, was enough. And right now, faced with the reality of this little prone body, the life of even one wild bird seems like a high price to pay.

I'm feeling a little guilty.