Pondi Play Precinct Structures, Murray Bridge

The challenge

In Ngarrindjeri tradition Pondi is the giant Murray cod who carved the course of Moorundi, the River Murray, with his thrashing tail as he fled the hunter Ngurunderi. The Rural City of Murray Bridge set out to build him at Sturt Reserve, the town's river frontage, as the centrepiece of a new regional play precinct shaped with Ngarrindjeri Elders and community members so the story is told authentically. Magryn worked as part of a design team led by Sproutt, who carried the landscape design and community engagement, with WAX Design on the wider playspace and Exhibition Studios on the large bespoke play structures. Pondi is nothing like catalogue playground equipment: children climb into the head, scramble through the ribs that form the body and slide out of the tail, up to six metres above the ground, and a yarning circle swing and canoe shelter sit alongside him. Turning sculpted forms of that kind into steel, hardwood and connections that could be fabricated in a workshop and assembled on a riverbank was the engineering problem Magryn was there to solve.

Our approach

A sculpture carries loads no catalogue drawing anticipates, so every element started from what it would actually have to resist. User loading was built up from AS 4685.1 by platform area and occupancy, worked level by level through the head, body and tail, then combined with wind actions from AS 1170.2 for the site's region and terrain, including the way the scales and mesh cladding change the area the wind pushes against. Pondi resolved into a frame of rolled and straight circular hollow sections with fabricated edge beams and cold formed joists between them, hardwood decking and cladding, mesh balustrade infill, and base connections and piles sized for the overturning a six metre form generates on an open riverfront. The steelwork is kept inside the shape, so the sculpture is what people see rather than the structure holding it up. Beneath all of it, the reserve is filled ground over soft silty clays with a high water table, so boreholes and penetration testing set founding depths, and a gravity retaining wall picks up the change in level where the structure meets reshaped ground.

The outcome

A cultural story and a landscape idea become a buildable set of structures, documented with drawings, specifications and calculations the council has taken to tender. Pondi is engineered as a climbable, walk through landmark carrying the occupancy loads the playground standard demands and the wind loads an open riverfront delivers, so the Ngarrindjeri story can be told at the scale it deserves and children can move through the head, ribs and tail exactly as the design intends. The yarning circle swing and canoe shelter are documented to the same standards, giving the precinct places to gather as well as to play. For the Rural City of Murray Bridge it turns the town's river frontage into a regional destination, built around a story that belongs to this stretch of the river.