Kings Park Giant Megafauna – May Drive Parkland

The animals are the right subject for the setting. Australia's Pleistocene megafauna – Diprotodon, the marsupial lion, giant kangaroos and a monitor lizard considerably larger than any alive today – vanished within the last fifty thousand years, and Western Australia has produced significant fossil evidence of them. Building replicas in a botanic garden dedicated to the state's own flora extends the same idea backwards: this is what used to live in this country.

The design intent is unusually explicit about the audience. The precinct is described as particularly suited to children of about seven and over, with the walkways, the fort and the megafauna to admire, all playing on the evolution-through-time theme. This is a playground with a curriculum.

The Botanic Gardens and Parks Authority promotes the replicas as a major feature and marks them on current park maps.

How many animals there are, which species they depict and who built them have not made it into the available material – a surprising gap for a major feature of one of the country's best-known parks, and one a park enquiry would close in minutes.