On the Great Eastern Highway out beyond Midland, about 20km or so from Perth’s CBD, Swan View fringes the extensive John Forrest National Park, WA’s first proclaimed national park.
Popular with jaded city folk, this park, which guards the entrance to the increasingly important wine-growing region of the Swan Valley, is criss-crossed with walking trails and contains the Darling Range escarpment within its boundaries.
It is a wild, verdant place full of dams, waterfalls, billabongs and creeks among which big and dramatic granite boulders shrug their strangely-shaped shoulders.
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, sustenance workers built steps, ornamental gardens, walls, footpaths, picnic shelters and swimming areas in the park. Honey possums and western pygmy possums inhabit heathlands and mardos are quite common, sometimes visible by day in forested areas. Woodland birds of the park include the 'twenty-eight' parrots and the less common red-capped parrots, rufous and golden whistlers, western spinebills and New Holland honeyeaters.
