Cullacabardee is a northeastern rural suburb of Perth, the capital city of Western Australia, located from Perth's central business district via Alexander Drive or Beechboro Road. It is in the City of Swan local government area. Most of the suburb is covered in native sheoak and banksia forest. A small Noongar community is based on Baal Street, a drug rehabilitation retreat is located off Gnangara Road in the suburb's northeast, and the Perth International Telecommunications Centre facility is based in the suburb's northwest.
Geography
Cullacabardee is north of Perth's central business district, beyond the residential suburb of Ballajura. It covers approximately ) and its borders are Gnangara Road to the north, Alexander Drive to the west, Hennessy Road (Old Beechboro Road) to the east and Hepburn Avenue to the south. Only one public road, Baal Street, enters the locality.
Much of the suburb's area, formerly owned by the Western Australian Planning Commission and known as "IP8 West", became part of Whiteman Park on 31 March 2000 and contains about of regionally significant bushland. The remaining sections are zoned General Rural under the City of Swan's 1993 Cullacabardee Rural Plan.
Cullacabardee is located over an unconfined aquifer known as the Gnangara Mound, a major supplier of scheme groundwater to the Perth Metropolitan Area. The area is classified as an underground Water Pollution Control Area under the Water Authority Act 1984 and a Priority 1 drinking water source by the now defunct Department of Water. A survey of soils in the area in April 1999 indicated that Cullacabardee's soil is located in the Bassendean Sand soil association, and is a leached white siliceous sand of mineral quartz, with negligible phosphorus retention capability. Vegetation is mainly low woodland forests of sheoak and banksia, with scattered jarrah.
Cullacabardee Aboriginal community
The community at Cullacabardee consisting of 30 units set in 40 hectares of bushland has existed since about 1980, and was designed for four different groups who the Western Australian Government perceived to be "having difficulty surviving in suburbia" and who would otherwise be homeless. Families were first moved into the homes on 8 October 1980 and the Cullacabardee Aboriginal Corporation was registered and incorporated on 21 March 1984 under paragraph 45(1) of the Aboriginal Councils and Associations Act 1976, and is vested in the Aboriginal Lands Trust. The community's housing is managed by the state's Department of Housing, but local programs and maintenance are managed by the Aboriginal Corporation and funded by federal and state governments.
Alleged problems
Some discussion in local media has focussed on alleged problems within the community. In 1999, The Australian reported that many of Cullacabardee's residents were unemployed, had no public transport despite 20 years of State Government management and no access to jobs, shops, education or health services. The article noted that "residents have to walk up to along a dangerously busy road or through a bush track to reach a shop or bus stop", and that the nearest primary school is away. Nine derelict homes in the community were being refurbished under a training scheme to assist young community members to gain skills, although the community claimed that funding was only available for 12-month periods, making apprenticeships (which run for several years) impossible to offer. A review report into the community in 2000 identified these and other issues such as the land being zoned General Rural, effectively prohibiting residential development, and the illegal dumping of concrete demolition rubble and other refuse near the community.
In 2003, a series of articles in The West Australian newspaper claimed that gun violence, threats to women and children and other social problems were widespread at Cullacabardee and at similar camps at Gnangara and at Saunders Street, Henley Brook, and reported some residents' criticism of the community's long-time manager, Ivy Quartermaine. Reporting to a government select committee into the operation of the reserves later the same year, Homeswest director Greg Joyce defended Quartermaine: "She has done her best over a long time to run the place. One of the dilemmas we always get involved with is that when families are dysfunctional in the normal community, the tendency is for the system to ask Mrs Quartermaine to take them." He said the department were "legitimately ambivalent" towards the future of the camp.