Abstract:
What is the religious or spiritual significance of the Australian natural
environment to non-Indigenous Australians? This question is asked in relation to the
parklands along the Georges River, in south-western Sydney, and some of the ethnic
groups who live in the ‘social catchment’ of these parklands. The post-Reformation
rationalist Christianity of Anglo-Celtic migrants led to a degree of institutional religious
disengagement with nature, a disenchantment of places, that may tend to obscure the
spiritual tone of the relationship that many Anglo-Australians clearly do have with the
natural environment. Migrants from East Asia can be seen to be drawing their cultural
links closer to the natural landscape as it exists in and around Sydney by engaging this
landscape with wider narratives of emplaced spiritual presence. This situation is evident in
the construction of Buddhist forest monasteries, the practice of meditation in the bush and
in the mapping of geomantic forces and flows.
