BUS Tourists disembark in Pioneer Park for a quick stop on the weekend, Saturday July 1.
Not likely to go for a walk to the rotunda are they? How pleasant Gawler’s Pioneer Park vagrants, swag camp, and rubbish must appeal to them.
What an image it creates of our town. My daughter-in-law cancelled kicking a ball around in the park with my fouryear-old grandson on Sunday afternoon after she saw the state of the park and its residents.
This was before she had spoken to or contacted me about the issue.
Upon arrival in front of my place she had made up her own mind before I spoke to her.
We went elsewhere.
Neighbours with grandchildren tell me that they have also stopped using the park for the same reason.
I was coming home from Clonlea Park this [past] Monday morning and was stopped in Warren St by a resident of Lyndoch Rd.
The conversation opened by them, husband and wife, asking me when I was going over to clean up the litter in the park.
They told me that they were now taking the extra walk down Warren St because the Pioneer Park vagrants made it so unpleasant to be there.
No longer do I see children fresh from weekend dance classes playing in the rotunda pretending they are on the world stage.
No amateur guitarists simply doing the same thing.
No parents with kids.
No young couples having a picnic anywhere nearby.
No families or children simply hanging around playing on the bars or near the rotunda.
I do not make a special point of going to the park to see these things.
I walk my dog several times a day and occasionally go into my front yard and I come and go from time to time.
I see people start to walk across the park and change direction to avoid the rotunda residents.
I see the rubbish around them and I see the graffiti on the rotunda posts.
I am now specifically targeted by loud, boorish shouting from the rotunda when I am in my front garden.
They shout to me that they know about The Bunyip printing my last letter to you on the issue, and abused me for it.
The elderly couple this morning started the conversation with me, not the other way around, reporting how they had experienced swearing and cussing while they walked passed and their concerns about the rubbish around the rotunda’s circumference.
Gawler has now become the Garden of Eden for itinerants, vagrants and other homeless.
They merely have to catch the free train to Gawler where, supported by local service clubs and religious groups, they are given a free swag, they are given free food in the park and not moved on by council or police and seem simply allowed to abuse passers-by and rubbish the place.
Vagrants are those who have no job and rely on handouts from others.
Admittedly a less benevolent term than the more benign, sympathy-engaging, politically correct word “homeless”.
We are making a rod for our own backs if we do not stop this now.
If we do not motivate those who we pay rates and taxes to do their jobs.
I merely ask that they do regular ordinary patrols of the park and move on those who are breaching our laws and by-laws.
John Bolton, Gawler East
