Kindergarten, Year 1 and Year 2 children from Canterbury South Public School left their classrooms on 16 August to help plant native vegetation at the new $905,000 stormwater treatment wetland under construction at Cup and Saucer Creek, beside the Cooks River in Sydney’s west.

The local children were also shown a variety of live water bugs that will populate the pools as the plants grow, providing food for frogs, birds, lizards, fish and turtles. The children got their hands wet and the tour guide from Sydney Water’s stormwater team, Daniel Cunningham (pictured below), was asked many questions.

The wetland will treat dry weather flows that often contain the majority of pollutants. The stormwater will pass through a series of densely planted pools of different depths, becoming progressively cleaner before re-entering the creek.

The Cup and Saucer Creek wetland will be home to 37 different plant species and around 24,000 individual plants when it is finished in September/this month. The wetland will link in with future works on the banks of the adjacent Cooks River. This will be the first of three riverbank sites Sydney Water will implement as part of an $8 million investment in naturalising deteriorated sections of the Cooks River.

The next stages of the Cooks River Bank Naturalisation Project will involve replacing a total of 1.1 kilometres of concrete channel banks with native plants and sandstone at Cup and Saucer Creek, Flockhart Street to Beamish Street in Campsie and upstream of Second Avenue in Belfield.

Sydney’s Cooks River has suffered degradation for around 200 years and the problems it still faces are complex and extensive. Nonetheless, Sydney Water in partnership with the Sydney Metropolitan Catchment Management Authority, Canterbury City Council and the Cooks River Foreshore Working Group is improving water quality in the river one project at a time.