Mangroves, garbage, fishing: Bringing everyday ecology to Sydney’s industrial Georges River
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Abstract
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.
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https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-20-4-1001
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Winston, Denis, 1957: Sydney's Great Experiment: the progress of the Cumberland County Plan, Angus and Robertson, Sydney.
Allport, Carolyn, 1987: 'Castles of Security: The New South Wales Housing Commission and Home Ownership 1941-1961', pp 95-124 in Max Kelly (ed) Sydney: City of Suburbs, UNSW Press in association with the Sydney History Group.
Andrewartha, H.G. and Charles Birch, 1954: The Distribution and Abundance of Animals, University of Chicago Press, Chicago.
Barhnam, Glennys, 2003: Riverside Reflections: memories of Lugarno, self published, Sydney.
Beder, Sharon, 1989: Toxic fish and sewer surfing :how deceit and collusion are destroying our great beaches, Allen & Unwin, Sydney.
Buchanan, M. 1976: 'Dumping on Land', chapter 10 of Butlin, N.G. (ed) 1976: Sydney's Environmental Amenity, 1970-1975, Australian National University Press, Canberra.
Burgmann, Meredith and Burgmann,Verity, 1998: Green bans, red union: environmental activism and the New South Wales Builders Labourers' Federation, UNSW Press, Sydney.
Butlin, N.G. (ed) 1976: Sydney's Environmental Amenity, 1970-1975, Australian National University Press, Canberra.
Cipolla, Carlo M, 1992: Miasmas and Disease: Public Health and Environment in the Pre-Industrial Age, Yale University Press, New Haven, CT.
Coward, Dan Huon 1976: 'From Public Health to environmental amenity, 1870-1970', Chapter 1 of Butlin, N.G. (ed) 1976: Sydney's Environmental Amenity, 1970-1975, Australian National University Press, Canberra.
Coward, Dan Huon, 1988: Out of Sight: Sydney's Environmental History 1851 - 1981, Department of Economic History, Australian National University, Canberra, ACT.
Davies, Jaquellne, Dorothy Mulholland, and Nora Pipe. 1979. West of the River Road. Towrang Publications.
Doyle,T.J. 2000: Green power: the environment movement in Australia, UNSW Press, Sydney.
Dovers, Stephen 2000: Environment, history and policy: still settling Australia, 2000, 306, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
Dovers, Stephen1994: Australian environmental history: essays and cases, Oxford University Press, Melbourne.
Dwyer, D.J. and Associates, 1972: Report on the Disposal of Solid Wastes for the Metropolitan Waste Disposal Authority, Sydney, cited in M. Buchanan: 'Dumping on Land', Chapter 10 of Butlin (ed) Sydney's Environmental Amenity.
Earnshaw, Beverly 2001: The Land Between Two River : the St George district in Federation times, Kogarah Historical Society, Kogarah, Sydney.
Gilpin, Alan 1980: Environment Policy in Australia, UQ Press, St Lucia.
Goodall, Heather, 2006: 'Frankenstein, Triffids and Mangroves: anxiety and changing urban ecologies' in Australian Folklore, 21, pp 82-98.
Haworth, Robert J. 1995: 'Bush Tracks and Bush Blocks: The Aerial Photographic Record from South-West Sydney, 1930 – 1950' ' ANZ Journal of Person Environment Studies, 49: 32-42.
Howard, K. (1973). An Essay on Contemporary Change and Prospects of the Georges River. Diploma of Environmental Studies. Sydney, Macquarie University.
Howes, Michael 2005: Politics and the environment : risk and the role of government and industry, Allen & Unwin, Crows Nest, N.S.W.
Hutton, Drew and Libby Connors, 1999: A history of the Australian environment movement, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge; Melbourne.
Joy, C; M. Buchanan and W. Hickson 1976: 'Rivers, Bays and Ocean', chapter 6 of Butlin, N.G. (ed) 1976: Sydney's Environmental Amenity, 1970-1975, Australian National University Press, Canberra.
McLoughlin, Lynne, 1985a: The Middle Lane Cove River: a history and a future, Centre for Environmental and Urban Studies Macquarie University, Sydney.
McLoughlin, L., 1985b: 'Mangroves in perspective', Proceedings of the First International Marinas Conference, Macquarie. University. 1985. Graduate School of the Environment, Macquarie University.
McLoughlin, L., 1987: Mangroves and grass swamps: Changes in shoreline vegetation of the middle Lane Cove River, Sydney, 1780's-1980's. Wetlands (Australia), 7 (1): 13-24.
McLoughlin, L., 2000: 'Shaping Sydney Harbour: sedimentation, dredging and reclamation 1788-1990s', Australian Geographer 31 (2) 183-208.
https://doi.org/10.1080/713612246
Martin V. Melosi 2004: Garbage In The Cities: Refuse Reform and the Environment University of Pittsburgh Press; Pittsburgh, Revised edition.
Mayne, Alan, 1993: The imagined slum: newspaper representation in three cities, 1870-1914, Leicester University Press, Leicester; New York.
Molloy, Andrew 2004: The History of Padstow, Australian Media, Sydney.
Molloy, Andrew, 2005: The History of Panania, Picnic Point and East Hills, University Publishing Services, University of Sydney.
Mulligan, Martin and Stuart Hill 2001: Ecological pioneers: a social history of Australian ecological thought and action, Cambridge University Press, New York.
Papadakis, Elim, 1996: Environmental politics and institutional change, Cambridge Universtiy Press, Cambridge; Melbourne.
https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511518171
Robin, Libby, 1998: Defending the Little Desert :the rise of ecological consciousness in Australia, Melbourne University Press, Carlton, Vic.
Robin, Libby, 2007: How a continent created a nation, UNSW Press, Sydney.
Rosen, S, 1996: Bankstown: a sense of identity, Hale & Iremonger. Sydney.
Spearitt, Peter, 1978: Sydney Since the Twenties, Hale & Iremonger, Sydney.
Tesh, S.N. 1995: 'Miasma and 'Social Factors' in Disease Causality: Lessons from the Nineteenth Century.,' J Health Politics, Policy and Law 20, no. 4.
https://doi.org/10.1215/03616878-20-4-1001
Timms, Peter. 2006. Australia's Quarter Acre: The Story of the Ordinary Suburban Garden. Melbourne: The Miegunyah Press.
Winston, Denis, 1957: Sydney's Great Experiment: the progress of the Cumberland County Plan, Angus and Robertson, Sydney.