I'd always seen the Port River estuary and the Le Fevre Peninsula as in-between lands or edge lands. I'd always imagined as existing on the edge of town: a site earmarked for industrial development that never happened. I'd seen it as the wasteland on the border of a city, derelict land so damaged by the pollution from industrial development that it was incapable of beneficial use without further treatment.
Edgelands are familiar yet ignored spaces which are neither city nor countryside. They are the half-rural, half urban nothingness, or raw and rough wasteland ton the fringes of the city and, as a desolate, forsaken netherworld whose existence goes unacknowledged, they stand in marked contrast to the tamed countryside or farmland.
Edgelands have traditionally have been without any signifier, an untranslated, ignored landscape between the duality of rural and urban landscape.They often lie on the border of the suburban fringe and seen as blots on the landscape until they are developed for suburban housing, industry or shopping centres.
Edgelands, by and large, are not meant to be seen, except perhaps as a blur from a car window as we hurry towards the countryside or the coast in search of wilderness and communion with nature; or as an ignored and forgotten backdrop to our most routine and mundane activities.
