Counter-mapping and migrancy on the Georges River

Sydney is unusual in having large areas of native bushland surviving in the very heart of the cityscape. These include the Georges River National Park, an area of bushland extending along both sides of a river, approximately 20 kilometres southwest of the CBD, which has cut a gorge-like bed for itself down through the yellow-orange sandstone, the city’s bedrock. The park comprises the bush-covered slopes of this gorge together with the alluvial flats along its bottom, some of which were extended by reclamation in the mid twentieth century to form lawned picnic grounds. At the top of the slopes the bushland extends for a short distance out into the flat surrounding country before it gives way quite abruptly to a suburban landscape of detached houses. The suburbs along the northern side of the river (closest to the city centre) were settled by successive waves of low-income AngloCeltic working-class families who moved there from the early nineteenth to the mid twentieth century. Significant numbers of these people campaigned to have areas of bushland along the river reserved for the health and enjoyment of their families in a part of Sydney that had very few parks (Goodall and Cadzow 2010). From the 1970s these suburbs received waves of migrants, principal among them refugees fleeing post-conflict Vietnam (Thomas 1999) and Arabic-speakers fleeing civil war in Lebanon and violence elsewhere in the Middle East (Dunn 2004). These people are sometimes referred to as ‘recent migrants’ to distinguish them from early waves of mostly Anglo-Celtic migrants who began arriving in Sydney in 1788. In the present day, these south-western suburbs of Sydney have the city’s highest concentrations of recent migrants. In 2006, in a city of 4.6 million people, 31.7 per cent of the residents of these suburbs were born overseas. It is a city in which 75 per cent of current population growth comes from migration.1 In the early 2000s the Office of Environment and Heritage NSW (OEH) began studying the way recent migrants engage with national parks in the Sydney area (Thomas 2001, Thomas 2002). Subsequently, OEH collaborated with the University of Technology Sydney on a project that looked more closely at the migrant experience of one specific park (the Georges River National Park) in order to gain a more detailed understanding of patterns of park visitation and of the cultural dynamics involved. It is the results of this study that are drawn upon in this chapter (Byrne et al. 2006, 2012; Goodall and Cadzow 2009, 2010).