Talk:Patawalonga River

Etymology

What does "Patawalonga" mean in Kaurna language? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 60.240.179.162 (talk) 11:30, 6 September 2010 (UTC)

Clarity

I changed some text which said the following:

The Patawalonga is probably best known for its notorious odour, which has been a problem for the "Pat" ever since European settlement since the mid-19th century.

I changed it because the claim is absurd. Maybe it could be true to people who live right next to it. This is not an encyclopaedia who live next to the Patawalonga river, though. So I fixed this, only to find my edit reverted by someone who is stalking my edits. They claimed that my change implied that the odour is currently a problem; no part of the sentence as it was implies that the problem is not current, and so either the person did not understand the sentence, or they did not care what it said and just wanted to revert my edit. I suspect the latter.

In the meantime, perhaps someone who does case about the sentence, and who knows when this odour has been a problem could further improve the sentence to make this clear. Rbka (talk) 23:40, 29 October 2017 (UTC)

User Rbka changed the wording to read "The Patawalonga has a strong odour". He is obviously unaware of the history of development of Holdfast Shores and of the construction of the Barcooo Outlet back in the 1990s, one of the aims of which was to deal with the need to periodically drain the Patawalonga Lake, during which time the exposed lake bed gave rise to the offensive odour.

His claim that I am stalking him is itself absurd - I have refrained form editing this article, because of a COI - I helped found the Friends of Patawalonga Creek 19 years ago, so I know the history pretty well from personal experience. Bahudhara (talk) 01:14, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

This person is indeed stalking my edits. After disagreeing with me on one article, they are now undoing my edits to many other articles, with no heed to the content of the edits. Here is the section as this unpleasant stalker now has it. I have highlighted in bold the parts that use the present tense. I did not change the tense of anything, and yet this disruptive reverter did it yet again claiming that the tense was the issue.

The Patawalonga is probably best known for its notorious odour, which has been a problem for the "Pat" ever since European settlement since the mid-19th century. The odour arises from seaweed that grows in the shallow depths of the river estuary and, in more recent times, due to stormwater pollution.

Dredging of the outlet beyond the weir to remove sand and seaweed build-up would at times cause the seaweed to float back to shore and rot on the beach, causing a stench.[7]

Also, if too much fresh water flows into the Patawalonga it can kill off saltwater species of fish that exist in the lake - which, again, can result in an unpleasant odour,[8][9][10] An event like this occurred on the weekend of 22–23 January 2005, and was reported on the front page of the Adelaide Advertiser as follows:

Residents woke yesterday to an "awful" stench and the sight of hundreds of seagulls converging on the area in a feeding frenzy.

If the user wants to object to my common sense and uncontroversial edit, they should think of an actual reason instead of a fictitious one. Rbka (talk) 07:29, 30 October 2017 (UTC)

Hmmm. Perhaps Rbka should consider the FACT that there are others know A LOT more about the subject matter than he does? Pdfpdf (talk) 11:58, 31 October 2017 (UTC)

Source

Donama has just changed the "source" to Netley, but the situation is more complicated.

(I won't edit the article myself, due to my COI - I'm the founder and chair of the Friends of Patawalonga Creek, which for almost 20 years has been involved in looking after the last 600 metre stretch of semi-natural channel and native vegetation, on Adelaide Airport land south of West Beach Road, and referred to as the Patawalonga Creek Conservation Reserve in the Adelaide Airport Master Plan.)

Prior to European settlement the Patawalonga River (or Creek) was an outflow channel of the vast area of wetlands the early settlers called the Reedbeds, which was flooded annually by the River Torrens, with the other outlet to the north being the Port River. (Breakout Creek is an artificial channel constructed during the mid-1930s as a Depression-era job creation project to prevent the annual flooding of nearby areas and open them up for development.) A good reference for the history is already listed as Ref 1.

At present the longest stretch of open channel drain feeding the Patawalonga Creek runs along Sir Donald Bradman Drive on the airport's northern boundary, from as far as Airport Road at Brooklyn Park, but this in turn is fed by underground drains of the Cowandilla-Mile End Drain, extending the catchment as far east as the western side of the Adelaide Park Lands. Cheers, Bahudhara (talk) 02:23, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

I ended up reverting myself shortly afterward, actually - a bad habit I know :$ Anyway, Netley definitely doesn't seem right as the drain on the south side of the airport is labelled as the lowest part of Brown Hill Creek on maps I looked at to write Keswick Creek (which could do with another set of eyes). So leaving it as "near the airport" seems sufficiently vague to agree with the complicated situation described above. Could we perhaps add some information about the historic source of the Patawalonga whatever combination of swamps that might have been. There's hardly anything on Wikipedia about "Reedbeds", so at least some kind of acknowledgement of the Pat's connection to it (as indicated by Bahudhara above) would be good, I think. Donama (talk) 04:13, 10 January 2018 (UTC)

Alas, I am conflicted again, having written a tour guide for several locations (including the remnant Patawalonga Creek) for the 2009 Friends of Parks Forum. It can be found here on the Port Adelaide Wiki. (It even has its own entry in Trove.) Bahudhara (talk) 05:37, 10 January 2018 (UTC)