Ashfield's supercalifragilisticexpialidocious park

Ashfield Park has lots of nice little surprises. There's the Mary Poppins' statue for example. 

Mary's creator, P L Travers, lived rght next to the park between 1918 and 1924. This was her pen name. She had been born Helen Lyndon Goff in Maryborough, Queensland, in 1899, and attended boarding school in Ashfield during World War One, and then stuck around for a while. Later she moved to England, where she took up writing children's stories about spoonfuls of sugar and perfect nannies. It seems she tried to cover up her Australian origins. That's how it was in those days.

She was a rather cantankerous old thing by all accounts. She fought fiercely with Walt Disney about his adaptation of her book - this was the subject of the 2013 film 'Saving Mr Banks', starring Emma Thompson and Tom Hanks - and when she died, in 1996, her grandchildren allegedly said no one loved her and she loved no one.

What else do you find in Ashfield Park? 

There's the memorial to the Bangladeshi martyrs who gave rise to the celebration of International Mother Language Day - 21 February. On that day in 1952 three students were gunned down by police in Dhaka for demonstrating in favour of having their language - Bengali - accepted as one of the then Pakistan's official languages.

And there's the Explorers' Park there too. It's got plaques illustrating the travels of all the main early explorers. Native born Australians all learn about these people at school, but I had to learn it in explorers parks.

I like this park. It's one of the best.