Gnomesville, Western Australia
Gnomesville is a large collection of garden gnomes that have mysteriously been placed at at the roundabout that joins Wellington Mill Road and Ferguson Road in the Ferguson Valley of
Western Australia. Nobody seems to know exactly how the quaint little hamlet of gnomes began and nobody is really sure who’s responsible for their existence.
One version goes that the roundabout was built when a group of year seven Dardanup Primary School students mentioned they thought the intersection was a traffic hazard during a mock council meeting. The council proper got wind of it, and soon the roundabout was under construction for real. Legend has it that a local Wellington Mills resident placed a single gnome at the site of the roundabout’s construction in good-humoured protest against what had become a controversial project in the town.
More gnomes soon came to join the silent protestor and soon the roundabout site had become a large gnome community complete with a sports ground that included two teams of football-playing gnomes, who switched to cricket with the change of season.
Gnomesville grew so quickly that the local Shire of Dardanup was forced to move the makeshift clay community from the middle of the roundabout to the nearby bush-land and verge as the gnomes were proving too much of a distraction for drivers approaching the roundabout. Strolling through the hamlet it’s impossible not to be impressed by the scale of the endeavour.There are over 2000 gnomes living here now.