“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.
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.
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
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