A gang of gnomes?
I first heard about the Gnome collection in the South West of Western Australia quite a few years ago. I sort of made a mental note to myself that one day when I was in the area I would visit these gnomes. Then I forgot about them. I moved to the south west and I regularly travelled on roads quite close to the gnome garden but never visited it.
Now I have been there. The scale of the garden was quite a surprise. No one told me there were thousands and thousands of these silly little concrete creations wearing hats. They were everywhere, along creeks beds, through the trees, hiding under debris and just out in the sunshine. Of course they were not all Gnomes. Many of them looked suspiciously like renegades from the Disney film about a runaway girl and seven strange fellows.
An endless sea of gnomes
I’m interested in how these sorts of places come into being. Are they planned as a tourist trap for people like me? The urban myth has it that once upon a time, long ago. Someone left a gnome on this particular roundabout as a sort of joke. Someone else left another, and another. Now busloads of foreign tourists arrive, take the obligatory photos, maybe even leave a gnome or two and move on to see the next idiosyncratic part of WA. Why? Is this what we need to do just to be different from elsewhere? or is this just quirky fun?
The Bard
Clare the glamorous gnome