chord of recognition for professionals and public alike - this is our landscape, this can be truer to our character than English parks or French formality, and so many times more pleasurable." Mackenzie coined a term for these park designs: "Alternative Parkland". Illoura was the first of these harbour side parks or "alternative parklands". Illoura Reserve has been described by the National Trust of Australia (NSW) as a seminal work and is described by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture as a critical contribution to Australian landscape architecture. Few people in Sydney at that time could identify local plant species and very few nurseries propagated them. The concept had never been tested in public parks, let alone sites which had disturbed and possibly contaminated soil conditions. Finn Thorvaldson, a young architect who assisted Mackenzie on the project, describes how they obtained Casuarina glauca (Swamp Oak) for the project: "the only thing that would grow close to the water, because of the water table, was Swamp Oak, Casuarina glauca, and of course no nursery had Casuarina glauca, it didn't exist in their vocabulary, but Bruce did employ somebody to collect the seed for that and actually grow it, so that was grown in a nursery for a year and then planted out. So it was a slightly different approach to going to buy plants off the shelf as you do now." Over the years Mackenzie was the first to grow and test other local plant species that are commonly used today, including Lomandra longifolia, Westringia fruticosa and Cissus Antarctica. Mackenzie's design approach at Peacock Point represents an early attempt to balance ecological, social and aesthetic values, although he would not have described it in those terms. In ecological terms the planting of large numbers of local trees and shrubs in a thick layer of recycled mulch created a better microclimate in the park and reduced weeding, mowing and watering requirements. Apart from reinstating the aesthetic qualities of "the bush", the choice of local plant species was seen as a way to attract birds and insects. Many of the materials such as telegraph poles, wharf piles, dimensioned sandstone and mulch were recycled, made possible by the abundance of second-hand materials generated by the demolition of old buildings in Sydney during the 1960s and 1970s. Although terms like "sustainability" and "biodiversity" had not yet been coined, Peacock Point was sustainable in terms of