Place-Making in National Parks: Ways that Australians of Arabic and Vietnamese Background Perceive and Use the Parklands Along the Georges River, NSW

This report presents outcomes from a collaborative research project between OEH and the University of Technology Sydney (jointly funded by OEH and the Australia Research Council under its Linkage program). The project set out in 2005 to study the parklands along the Georges River from the perspective of people of Aboriginal, Anglo-Celtic, Arabic, and Vietnamese background who reside in the suburbs bordering the river. The present report deals mainly with that part of the project which studied the distinctive ways that people of Arabic and Vietnamese background perceive, value and use the parklands along the Georges River. The history of Aboriginal presence on the river and its environs from 1788 to the present day is the subject of the book, Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal people on Sydney's Georges River, published in September 2009. The suburbs along the northern side of the river were settled by successive waves of low-income Anglo-Celtic working class families from the early 19th century to the mid-20th 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. This history resonates in interesting ways with the more recent history of communities from the Middle East and Asia who live along or near the river. A summary of early and changing Anglo-Celtic park use has been included in order to provide a comparative dimension to the present study. The report considers issues specific to parklands on the Georges River as well as some broader issues likely to have relevance to situations elsewhere in NSW, and further afield, where migrant communities make up a substantial fraction of the visitors to parks.