Imaginings on Sydney’s Edge: Myth, Mourning and Memory in a Fringe Community

Abstract

Sydney’s metropolitan fringe is a theatre for the creation and loss of collective memories, cultural myths and community grieving around cultural icons, traditions and rituals. European settlement took the dreaming of the Aborigines and then had its own dreaming removed by an invasion from the east in the form of Sydney’s urban growth. The re-making of place in and around the fringe community of Camden illustrates the destruction and re-construction of cultural landscapes. Locals dream of retaining the aesthetics of an inter-war country town and in doing so have created an illusion of a historical myth of a ‘country town idyll’. In the new suburbs of Oran Park, Mt Annan and Harrington Park urbanites have invaded the area drawn by developer spin, which promised to fulfil hopes and dreams and never really lives up to the hype. Unfulfilled expectations mean that Sydney’s rural-urban fringe is a zone of transition where waves of invasion and succession have created perceptions of reality and all that is left is imaginings.