The F L Yott Reserve

The
F L Yott Reserve is a Bayside City Council
reserve that
covers the block of land bounded by Bodley Street,
Tramway Parade, Martin Street and Dalgetty Road,
Beaumaris, except for the westernmost seventh
of that land the Anglican Church owns. It was
named after Cr Frederick Louis Yott, a councillorof the former City of Sandringham

from
1935 to 1950, and the Mayor for two of those
fifteen years.

The Reserve’s Tramway Parade frontage was the
site of the former BeaumarisHall

, which was the original building of
the Beaumaris Primary School in 1915. During
World War II, a public air raid shelter of
roofed trenches was at the south-east corner,
where tennis courts are now.

The Reserve is zoned PublicPark and Recreation

under the BaysidePlanning Scheme

. It is not one of
Bayside City Council’s BushlandReserves

. None of it has a VPO2
Vegetation Protection Overlay, but it all has
a VPO1
Vegetation Protection Overlay. The existing
land uses, which covernearly all of the Reserve

,
predated the Bayside Planning Scheme and
include:

• 
  BeaumarisMaternal and Child Health Centre

  ,

• OlivePhillips Kindergarten

  ;

• PeterHutchison Playground, named after a
  President of the former Parents

  and Citizens Association

• BodleyStreet Tennis Centre

  (6 en tous
  cas courts) and building;

• BeaumarisBowls Club

  , whose greens, club
  house, yard and two car parks occupy about
  half of the Reserve;

• thehall and yard of the Beaumaris

  Girl Guides; and

• thehall and yard of the First

  Beaumaris Sea Scouts.

General public access is restricted to a small
playground,
the three car parks, a sealed north-south
laneway in line with Haldane Street, a
10-metre wide strip of bushland on the western
edge of that laneway, and some small areas of
land that are not yet fenced off from the
public.

The surface of the sealed laneway is extremely
degraded. Using so much of the land area of
the reserve for an unnecessary black bitumen
laneway seems undesirable. A better use, and
one that is possibly less expensive than
resurfacing the unsightly laneway, would be to
replace it with a buffer area from the Bowls
Club consisting of a mown grass walkway, with
vehicle access only for emergencies, alongside
a strip of land added to the eastern edge of
the bushland area to make that bushland strip
more viable.

BUSHLAND:
This contains the only Manna Gums (Eucalyptus

pryoriana) left on the Reserve.
Two are large and healthy, but one is mostly
dead. There is also a Sweet Bursaria (Bursaria

spinosa) and several Acacias
(probably Acacia

implexa). The remaining bushland
is Coast Tea Tree (Leptospermum

laevigatum) and Seaberry Saltbush
(Rhagodia

baccata).

The

northernmost two-thirds of the
above 10-metre wide north-south strip
of land is nearly all indigenous

bushland, but it is not well cared
for. The southernmost third of the
strip is mostly mown grass. In
addition to mounds of soil that
children building bicycle riding
humps alongside the eastern fence
of the Guides and Scouts lease
have created, piles of lawn
clippings have been illegally
dumped next to the Sea Scouts’
lawn, and rank grass has been
allowed to invade the bushland
strip. A fine Manna Gum on the Sea
Scouts’ lawn died early this
century, but it seems no effort
has been made to replace it.

Most trees

on the rest of the Reserve are
native trees, but few are
indigenous. Two coastal tea trees,
just south of the Bowls Club house,
appear on the Register

of

Significant Trees
of the National Trust of
Australia. There are also Coastal
Tea Trees and a fine Drooping Sheoak
(Allocasuarina

verticillata) just south
of the Guide hall.