A mess of invasive weeds behind a chainwire fence: come through the battered-down gate with me for a tour of poor old Steele Creek North

Neglect (and abuse) of nature and shared spaces shows the failure of suburbia as well as showcasing its obliteration of our native ecosystems. This could easily have been a beautiful park and/or conservation reserve.

It's been a good year for Chilean Needle Grass, one of our worst invasive weed species. This big open space between the M80 motorway and the creek, once native grassland, has no native plants visible, and is almost all nationally recognised threatening weeds.

A crew were drilling test bores for unknown purposes by the creek, and several km of ineffectual temp fencing has been erected around their access track. It's unclear what the fencing is protecting (remnant Redgums?) or obviously no-one is monitoring/enforcing it much

Eventually, Steele Creek North joins Steele Creek and runs through this pipe under the railway...

At the other end the creek emerges as a concrete drain in polite suburban Airport West, where the Chilean Needle Grass in the adjacent park is carefully mowed (one of the ways it spreads is on mowers)

While the care taken in the suburban park may be greater, the wilderness of weeds upstream is more naturally vibrant. Not so much a wasteland as a wasted opportunity. The problem is rubbish city planning, not rubbish dumping.

If you look carefully there are still glimpses of beauty. I saw ducks, honeyeaters, magpies and a small hawk (and heard what was probably a snake in the grass). Expensive to clean up? Only compared to our current miserly conservation budgets.

We are spending a (?)hundred billion dollars on submarines for our navy for unknown reasons in 20 years, but the known deterioration of our biodiversity - of the natural systems we rely on - is on a token drip-feed.

Many remaining open spaces, living on borrowed time, may eventually be turned into more concrete warehousing and factories. Our mega-cities sprawl ever outward, unsustainable and antisocial. None of this is inevitable. It's a choice.