Laurel Avenue Community Garden

The redeveloped Laurel Avenue community garden has been named Laurel Avenue Pirkurna Wirra / Peter Bennett Organic Community Garden

The City of Burnside has been embarking on a journey of reconciliation. This has involved partnering with the Kaurna reference group on various projects and efforts, which includes consideration of Kaurna names for local places when possible.

The name Laurel Avenue Pirkurna Wirra was provided by Kaurna Warra Karrpanthi, the leading group dedicated to Kaurna language revitalisation and maintenance. Pirkurna loosely translates as ‘communities / group of people’, while Wirra translates as ‘forest of trees / garden’. While the site no longer has access from Laurel Avenue, the site’s address is 31 Laurel Avenue, Linden Park. Kaurna Warra Karrpanthi nominated the full name to include Laurel Avenue.

Peter Reginald Dane Bennett (1928 – 2010) was a resident of Wattle Park and a pioneer of organic gardening in Australia. He also showed leadership in promoting ecology, sustainability, pollution awareness and the plight of the River Murray. For more than 30 years Peter Bennett operated the Organic Gardening Centre, educating the community in good gardening practices. He achieved this through communicating over his shop counter as well as via radio and television. He was also an accomplished author, with multiple editions and reprints of his book Organic Gardening. In recognition of this, Peter Bennett was awarded as City of Burnside 2007 Citizen of the Year.

As a past local resident with a passion for organic gardening and community gardens, the new community garden is named to recognise his contributions. The garden would operate as an organic garden, to reflect his teachings.

His widow, Sandra, said she and her family were “thrilled, honoured and humbled” to have the garden named after Peter. “He was an entrepreneur,” she said. “He would be very happy about putting the Indigenous name first.”

Sandra Bennett with the newly erected sign at the garden.