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MICHAEL MANGOLD

  • PHOTO ESSAYS
    • PORTRAITS
    • HARBOUR TRUST TESTING
    • LITERACY IN THE STREET
    • HISTORIC CALLAN PARK
    • PROTECTING PARKLANDS
    • LUNA PARK, SYDNEY
    • SYDNEY ON THE ROCKS
    • INDIGENOUS GROOVES
    • APPLE AND EVE
    • NATURAL RESPONSE
    • STREET ART DISCOVERY
    • CONFLAGRATION
    • PHOTOGRAPHIC MEMORY
  • Blog
  • BOOKS
    • PADDINGTON MARKETS
    • EUMUNDI MARKETS
    • BHP WIREMILL
  • WRITING
  • Bio
  • Contact

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ABOVE: Advertising onsite at Marsden Park North appeals to aspirations to promote sales while ignoring the risks to buyers of homes built on flood plains.

ABOVE: Advertising onsite at Marsden Park North appeals to aspirations to promote sales while ignoring the risks to buyers of homes built on flood plains.

SYDNEY ON THE ROCKS

November 18, 2020

“The built environment affects our physical health and our mental health. It affects our cognitive capabilities. And it affects the ways we form and sustain communities.“ ‘Welcome To Your World: How The Built Environment Shapes Our Lives’ by Sarah Williams Goldhagen

The upside of the COVID-19 pandemic for me has been the opportunity to revisit sacred sites of my childhood. These sites used to be protected by the greenbelt Governor Macquarie created around Sydney in the early days of the colony. When I was growing up half a century and more ago it was farmland, bush, rivers and creeks. This greenbelt, Sydney’s lungs, rich agricultural land on the flood plains of Hawkesbury River tributaries, is being shredded by politicians and developers.

Marsden Park, named after Reverend Marsden ‘the flogging parson’ of Macquarie’s day, is now being covered with tracts of densely packed dormitories erupting along tollways and roads as fast as they are extruded. The waterways, once an abundant source of fresh water, fish, prawns, shellfish, worms and yabbies, in an ecosystem featuring trees, grasslands, wildlife and Indigenous people, are now funnelled by pipes into concrete channels.

ABOVE: Creeks and streams are water courses providing habitat and species diversity, concrete channels turn them into dirty drains for buildings on flood plains.

ABOVE: Creeks and streams are water courses providing habitat and species diversity, concrete channels turn them into dirty drains for buildings on flood plains.

The risk of these densely packed housing developments built on flood plains being flooded is real. It’s hard to understand how they qualify for insurance particularly when the NSW Planning and Environment Planning for Marsden Park North report, May 2015 acknowledges “Flooding is a significant issue for the area and a key challenge in the planning process.” This casts a dark shadow over the Berejiklian government’s proposal to increase the height of the Warragamba Dam wall by 17 metres.

ABOVE: Warragamba Dam Saturday 15 August 2020. Plans to raise the wall by 17 metres is the Berejiklian government’s justification for building on flood plains.

ABOVE: Warragamba Dam Saturday 15 August 2020. Plans to raise the wall by 17 metres is the Berejiklian government’s justification for building on flood plains.

The Sydney Basin is being clogged and choked by tollways, roads and traffic. Only the tiny remnants of bushland give a clue to what was and what has been destroyed to satisfy politicians’ lust for power, careless planning and the endless greed of property ‘developers’ and real estate agents.

In places where migrants once pioneered a unique egalitarian Australian way of life newcomers are lately fleeced and deposited in screen-based compounds. Australia rides on the migrant’s back.

LINK

Planning NSW, Marsden Park North report May 2015

Planning NSW, Marsden Park North master plan July 2020

'Like the Franklin': Future of Sydney's last wild river hangs in the balance, Peter Hannam, Sydney Morning Herald, 25 October 2020

GIVE A DAM Twitter @giveadam_ Instagram @giveadam_campaign

Colong Foundation for Wilderness Twitter @ColongWild

Riverstone Historical Society


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about me

The ingenuity of people working,learning and campaigning to make life better and more interesting for themselves, their families and community, always get my attention. Clean air, clean water and free access to education, public spaces, nature, education the arts, heritage, planning and environmental protection, are the things I believe in.

Follow me on instagram @kodak127 and Twitter @mikerdot