A Trip to the Poo Farm
Photographic homage to a biodiversity hotspot on Melbourne’s doorstep
I’m going to hazard a guess that a day out at a water treatment plant is not your idea of a good time. If I invited you to accompany me on a trip to the ‘Poo Farm’ you’d probably find something else important that you needed to do.
You’d be missing out: Melbourne Water’s Western Treatment Plant is one of Australia’s great environmental wonders.
The ‘business end’ — let’s not be coy: the shitty end — is high-tech, efficient and odour-free, thanks to the giant membranes over the tanks. The 500,000,000 litres of water which are processed and released every day are remarkably clean.
All this high-tech efficiency means that the older settling ponds and lagoons are no longer needed for water treatment. They form a sprawling network of diverse wetlands in the flat coastal plain between the You Yangs hills and the bay.
These artificial wetlands are home to the greatest diversity of birdlife in Australia (295 species across 10,500 hectares), surpassing even the renowned Kakadu National Park in the Northern Territory (280 species across 2 million hectares).
