Suchergebnisse

Rivers and Resilience traces the history of Aboriginal people along Sydney's Georges River from the early periods of British and Irish settlement to the present. It offers a dramatically new approach to Aboriginal history in an urban setting in Australia. Leading historians investigate the continuities and changes experienced by Aboriginal communities in this densely settled suburban area where the continued presence of Aboriginal people, including traditional owners, is largely - and wrongly - ignored

Post war problems of rising urban, industrial pollution and intractable waste disposal are usually considered as technical and economic problems only, solutions to which were led by experts at State level, and filtered into Australia from the ferments occurring in the United States and Britain in the 1960s and 70s. This paper investigates the change which arose from the localities in which the impact of those effects of modern city development were occurring. In particular, this study looks at a working class, industrial area, the Georges River near Bankstown Municipality, which was severely affected by Sydney's post-war expansion. Here, action to address urgent environmental problems was initiated first at the local level, and only later were professional engineers and public health officials involved in seeking remedies. It was even later that these local experts turned from engineering strategies to environmental science, embracing the newly developed ecological analyses to craft changing approaches to local problems. This paper centres on the perspective of one local public health surveyor, employed by a local municipal council to oversee waste disposal, to identify the motives for his decisions to intervene dramatically in river health and waste disposal programs. Rather than being prompted to act by influences from higher political levels or overseas, this officer drew his motivation from careful local data collection, from local political agitation and from his own recreational knowledge of the river. It was his involvement with the living environments of the area – the ways in which he knew the river - through personal and recreational experiences, which prompted him to seek out the new science and investigate emerging waste disposal technologies.

Vietnamese Australians who arrived in Australia as refugees since the 1970s and later as migrants, have developed complex relationships of remembering, knowing and belonging to environments in Vietnam and Sydney. Water was a frequent point of reference in our interviews with Vietnamese people in Sydney, and their relationships with water are used in this article to explore interviewees' associations with places. The article focuses on cultural knowledge of environments, which people bring with them, such as their connections with rivers and oceans, central to both memories of place and the histories of Vietnam. These memories also change with return visits and experiences between these places. Vietnamese refugees' experiences of escape and trauma coming across oceans from Vietnam also influence subsequent relationships with place. Finally, relationships with Sydney parks and urban waterways are explored by examining popular places for family and community get-togethers along Georges River, located near where many Sydney Vietnamese people live. These have become key places in making Sydney home for Vietnamese people. The article considers how Vietnamese Australian cultural knowledge of place could be shared and acknowledged by park managers and used in park interpretation.