Australian Garden History Society

4141stst Annual National Conference Annual National Conference

Sydney 2021

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41st annual conference Sydney

Professor Grace Karskens

Grace Karskens is Professor of History and Public Humanities at the University of New South Wales. She is a leading authority on early colonial Australia, cross-cultural history, and environmental history. Her research and writing have transformed and changed the way we understand Australian colonial and cross-cultural history and reached national and international audiences. Her books have won prestigious prizes, including the 2010 Prime Minister’s Award for Non-Fiction for The Colony: A History of Early Sydney. Her next book People of the River: Lost Worlds of Early Australia was published by Allen & Unwin in September 2020.

Grace began her career as a freelance historian and has a lifelong commitment to bringing good history to wide audiences through writing, speaking and teaching. She is an active contributor to several major cultural and government organisations, including Sydney Living Museums, the State Library of New South Wales and the online Dictionary of Sydney. Her work has informed films, television and radio programs, museum exhibitions and has inspired public art. Grace was elected a Fellow of the Australian Academy for the Humanities in 2010. She is a keen gardener. (Photograph by Joy Lai)

Gardens and gardening are key expressions of culture and the way people see their worlds: how they conceive of land, space, and the more-than-human world of plants, animals and insects. So gardens can be read ethnographically, as complex and intricate archives of world-views, ambitions, morality and character, but also simple tastes and pleasures.

In this paper I will explore the fundamental relationship between geology, soils and gardening in the early colony of New South Wales, the surprisingly global tastes of the gardening colonists and the way gardens and cultivation were powerfully linked to colonisation through the idea of ‘civilisation’. But what if we rethink what gardening actually is and who does it? How might this transform the familiar dichotomies of nature and culture, the bush and the garden, coloniser and colonised?

Keynote: The pleasures and politics of gardening in the colony of New South Wales

Professor Grace Karskens

Keynote Speaker

41st annual conference Sydney

Dr Paul Irish & Michael Ingrey

Paul Irish is a historian and archaeologist with Sydney firm Coast History & Heritage. For over ten years he has been piecing together the Aboriginal history of coastal Sydney with researchers from the La Perouse Aboriginal community, including the 2015 NSW History Fellowship exhibition This Is Where They Travelled: Historical Aboriginal Lives in Sydney and his 2017 book Hidden in Plain View: The Aboriginal people of Coastal Sydney, which won the NSW Premier’s History Award for Regional and Community History. Michael Ingrey belongs to the Dharawal people of coastal Sydney and Illawarra and Dunghutti peoples of the Macleay Valley of the mid-north coast of NSW. Michael has spent over a decade researching the ancestors of his community, in particular their movements and places of residency prior to the establishment of the La Perouse Aboriginal community, situated on the northern arm of Botany Bay in the early 1880s. In Michael’s own words: ‘All I am doing is contributing to my people’s history, by bringing together our old stories and historical records to ensure that we can interpret our history, through our cultural lens to limit misinterpretation of information for the next generation of coastal Sydney blackfullas’.

Aboriginal people have always lived in Sydney. They were there as the harbour formed at the end of the last ice age. They fished its waters for thousands of years before the first Europeans arrived. Despite violent dispossession and disease, Aboriginal people remained around the shores of the harbour in colonial times. They found new ways to live as the Sydney colony expanded - but maintained their connection and identity, even in the heart of the city. These are continuing histories, passed down through families in the La Perouse Aboriginal community, with new chapters being written by each generation.

Aboriginal Sydney – a long history of adaptation and continuity

Dr Paul Irish

Michael Ingrey

Speaker

41st annual conference Sydney

Edwina & John Macarthur-Stanham

John and Edwina are the custodians of Camden Park and have the responsibility of maintaining its heritage significance, its agricultural activities and the house as a family home. They share an interest in historic properties and gardening. They have undertaken and overseen many projects that have preserved and enhanced the historic features of Camden Park and its garden.

John has an Economics degree (USYD) and an MBA (UNSW). He has worked for major Australian Companies Brambles and CSR, and has served on the boards of public companies and government entities including as Vice Chair of Trust Company and Deputy Chairman of Dairy Farmers Milk Co-operative. Government appointments have included board membership of Sydney Catchment Authority and inaugural Chair of NSW Local Land Services. Community service roles: Chairman of the Upper Nepean Water Users Association and member of the Hawkesbury Nepean Management Forum. He was Treasurer of the Camden Show Society for many years and served a term on the National Trust of Australia (NSW) Board in the 1980s.

Edwina has a degree in Languages (USYD), is a graduate of the National Art School, and a practising artist. She has managed the running of events and venue location at Camden Park since 1990 and has overseen 30 Camden Park House and Garden Open Weekends held annually in September. Edwina shares with John an avid interest in early colonial history and the history of the Macarthurs and Camden Park, and is actively involved with the Camden Park garden.

Today the Camden Park garden still retains William’s imprint on its layout, with its collection of significant trees, rare plants, orchid houses, wine vats and “lower garden”. These all provide a fascinating insight into what was and is one of Australia’s most important colonial gardens.

Edwina and John look at the breadth of John Macarthur’s son William Macarthur‘s contribution to horticulture and agriculture in NSW in the 19th century and how one of his legacies, the Camden Park garden, survives today. William Macarthur was at the forefront of horticulture in the early years of New South Wales; a true horticultural pioneer. From the wine industry to plant collecting - breeding and trading - he led a most remarkable and constructive life.

Camden Park - William Macarthur’s garden then and now

Edwina & John Macarthur-Stanham

Speaker

41st annual conference Sydney

Professor Paul Ashton

Professor Paul Ashton is an adjunct at the University of Technology Sydney – where he co-established the Australian Centre for Public History in 1999 – at Macquarie University and at the University of Canberra. Co-founder and editor of the journal Public History Review, he has authored, co-authored and edited over thirty-five books. These include a history of town planning in Sydney – The Accidental City (Hale & Iremonger) – Once Upon a Time: Australian Writers on Using the Past (Australian Scholarly Publishing) and What is Public History Globally? Working with the Past in the Present (Bloomsbury) which he co-edited. He has on a number of occasions been a judge for the NSW Premier’s History Awards and is a member of the Heritage Office of NSW’s Heritage Advisory Committee. Paul is currently writing a series of creative non-fiction children’s history books for late primary and early high school pupils and co-editing a book on ‘The History Industry in Australia’ (forthcoming 2021 from Australian Scholarly Publishing).

All landscapes are complex. And Centennial Park is no exception. Inscribed on it are ideas of beauty, utility, empire, eugenics and euthenics – nature and nurture – class and belonging. The park was constructed from mid 1887 for the centenary of colonisation in the following year. But its creation reflected Indigenous occupancy. The northern boundary was an Aboriginal walking track. And its formation was in many ways accidental. If the area hadn’t been set aside as a water reserve in the 1810s it would have been covered by terrace and other housing. This presentation surveys this magnificent artefact’s evolution from a wasteland in the early nineteenth century to the so-called ‘birth place’ of a nation.

The People’s Park - Centennial Park to 1901

Professor Paul Ashton

Speaker

41st annual conference Sydney

Wendy Whiteley & Janet Hawley

For more than twenty years, Wendy Whiteley has worked to create a huge public garden at the foot of her harbourside home in Sydney’s Lavender Bay. Wendy was Brett Whiteley’s wife, muse and model. An artist herself, with a finely honed aesthetic sense, she also created the interiors at the heart of Brett’s iconic paintings of their Lavender Bay home. When Brett died, Wendy threw her grief and creativity into making an enchanting hidden oasis out of derelict land owned by the New South Wales Government. Daughter Arkie Whiteley loved the secret garden and contributed a thriving copse of Bangalow palms, but nine years on, Arkie died, compounding Wendy’s loss. This glorious guerrilla garden is Wendy’s living artwork.

Janet Hawley enjoyed a huge readership in her thirty-year career as senior feature writer on Good Weekend Magazine, published in The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age. She is renowned for her intimate profiles of artists and creative people, and trusted by her interview subjects to explore their private worlds and the mysteries of their creative processes. She’s published two books on artists: Artists In Conversation and Encounters With Australian Artists. Her book A Place On The Coast, co-authored with Philip Cox, explores a love of gardens, art and architecture. Her wide-ranging feature writing for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age and The Australian has won her numerous major awards, including two Walkley Awards and the Gold Walkley.

Janet’s long friendship with Brett and Wendy Whiteley led to her writing the story of Wendy’s major opus, the Secret Garden.

Wendy Whiteley transformed this large area of disused, overgrown railway land, into what became known as Wendy’s Secret Garden. Wendy, her husband, acclaimed artist Brett Whiteley and their daughter Arkie, lived in the tower house above, from late 1969. Wendy still lives in the house and is often seen working in the garden and always ready to engage with visitors about her work and the garden. The presentation is casual and free ranging across the history, constraints and issues. Wendy’s gardening is driven by aesthetics, colour, form, beauty and whimsy. The gradual removal of the waste and debris from the land below her home for about twenty years revealed a garden as if by magic but in fact, it is born of managing grief, hard toil and perseverance.

Wendy Whiteley and the Secret Garden at Lavender Bay

Wendy Whitely & Janet Hawley

Speaker

41st annual conference Sydney

Janine Kitson

Janine Kitson has had a career in education, served as an elected Councillor on Ku-ring-gai Council (2000-2004) and on the Boards of the National of Australia Trust (NSW), National Parks Association of NSW, Friends of Ku-ring-gai Environment, David G. Stead Memorial Wildlife Foundation, Combined Retired Union Member Association and the Lithgow Environment Group. Through this involvement, Janine has developed a passion for the history of the Australian environment movement and has presented many courses on this exciting new discipline at the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA Sydney). Recently Janine has written the WEA Sydney distance education Discussion Group course ‘Wombats, Wattle, Wilderness, World Heritage and Wellbeing’ that highlights the crises of biodiversity extinction and climate change. In January 2019 Janine was guest speaker for the National Council of Women’s Australia Day Scholarship 2019 luncheon at NSW Parliament House.

Leading up to the 1920s and 30s, there were growing concerns about the loss of Sydney’s bushland, its wildflowers, its colonial convict past, and the degradation of its landscape beauty for industry and the motorcar. Who were the Cosmopolitan Conservationists, how did their concerns and actions enable the retention of the green Sydney we know today? Historian Dr Peggy James explores the relational biography of the network of Sydney’s interwar conservationists, in her book Cosmopolitan Conservationists, Greening Modern Sydney (2013). With their extensive professional and social networks, these ‘activists’ were able to influence many government initiatives, policies, and legislative reforms that led to Sydney’s ‘green belts’, national parks, open space, parks and playgrounds. Why and how does their vision for Sydney remain?

Sydney’s ‘Cosmopolitan Conservationists’ – Why their vision remains

Janine Kitson

Speaker

41st annual conference Sydney

Dr Ian Hoskins

Dr Ian Hoskins has worked as a curator and an academic and a public historian for 25 years. He has worked as the North Sydney Historian for North Sydney Council since 2003. He is particularly interested in the cultural landscape, including the history of Sydney, its gardens, harbour and architecture, and the relationship between local and ‘big’ history.

Ian’s Sydney Harbour: A history won the 2010 Queensland Premier’s Literary Prize for History. Coast: A history of the NSW edge won the NSW Premier’s History Prize for regional history in 2014. He contributed to Anne Watson (ed.) Visionaries in Suburbia: Griffin Houses in the Sydney Landscape, and Tanya Evans (ed.) Swimming with the Spit: 100 years of the Spit Swimming Club. Rivers: Lifeblood of the country was published by the National Library of Australia in October 2020 and Australia and the Pacific: A history will be published by New South Books in October 2021.

Europeans were enthralled with the beauty of Sydney Harbour from the moment they entered the waterway in 1788. Unsurprisingly the artwork created over the following two centuries reflected the changing use of the waterway and shifts in the non-indigenous relationship to the harbour. In the late 18th century art depicted discovery and occupation. In the century that followed the arc of representation showed beauty and the consolidation of the Empire. In the 20th century, there was a belated even nostalgic embrace of the old working waterfront in the picturesque post-impressionism of Roland Wakelin and others. By 1988, and the Bicentenary of colonisation, the working harbour had given way to the post-industrial touristic play-pool of Ken Done.

One of nature’s choicest masterpieces: the changing representation of Sydney Harbour in art 1788 - 1988

Dr Ian Hoskins

Speaker

41st annual conference Sydney

Colleen Morris

Colleen Morris is a landscape heritage consultant, author and curator with expertise in the areas of cultural landscape assessment, garden history and conservation management. In addition to garden history and botanical art, Colleen is particularly interested in the management of cultural landscapes, how they enrich our lives and the stories they tell about our communities. She is a member of the Heritage Council of NSW, the committee of the Florilegium Society at the Royal Botanic Gardens and Domain Trust, Sydney and is Deputy Chair of the National Trust of Australia Landscape Conservation Committee. Colleen was AGHS National Chair 2003-2009.

As women’s skirts grew shorter, men’s hair longer and the enormous skeletal form of the shells of the Opera House emerging on Bennelong Point became Sydney’s defining image of the 1960s, in the parks and suburbs, a slow revolution of organic modernism took hold. Along the new freeway to Newcastle landscape architect Peter Spooner orchestrated a route through a monumental almost sculptural sandstone landscape replanted with native vegetation. In north west Sydney, the Carlingford Homes Fair of May-June 1962 demonstrated a modern approach to suburban living with superior quality housing designed by a range of young, talented architects in a bush landscape setting designed by Rex Hazlewood. And for suburban gardeners Designing Australian Bush Gardens appeared at the cost of 10 shillings or $1 in the new currency of 1966.

By the 1970s the pace of ‘progress’ gave rise to radical Green bans, the first of which was to protect Kelly’s Bush, an undeveloped piece of bushland in the suburb of Hunter’s Hill. The potential of former industrial sites abutting Sydney Harbour to be transformed to public parks began to be realised. At Illoura (Peacock Point) and Yurulbin Reserves, Bruce Mackenzie reconstructed foreshore landscapes in a style he later termed ‘Alternative Parkland’. In parallel to this environmental phase of modernism and the urge to conserve the old and recover the bush, came an impetus to document and review historic gardens, a drive that grew in strength by the close of the 1970s.

Sydney gardens and landscape in the 1960s - 70s

Colleen Morris

Speaker

41st annual conference Sydney

Roslyn Burge

Roslyn Burge is a Sydney-based public historian; her work includes commissioned histories, exhibitions and oral history projects. As a significant aspect of her practice, oral history projects include those commissioned by individuals, libraries, corporate and community entities, as well as projects she has initiated in her community (Goat Island communities during the 1940s, Mondo & More: 20th Century Greening of Leichhardt and the Rozelle Hospital Oral History Project). Roslyn also recorded some of the Society’s oral history interviews and whilst a member of the National Management Committee from 2013-2019 she was Convenor of the Oral History Committee. She is a member of the National Trust of Australia (NSW) Landscape Conservation Committee and her publications include No Peacetime Cinderellas: 60 years of the women of the War Widows’ Guild of Australia in NSW, Callan Park: Compassion and Conflict in the Asylum and Broughton Hall: Brought to Life.

The Australian Garden History Society formally commissioned its first oral history interviews in 2002, just before its jubilee, to record the recollections of people associated with the genesis and development of the Society. Now there are more than 60 interviews in the National Oral History Collection representing each state and the ACT. The changing focus of the interviews reflects the mission and scholarship of the Society, individuals’ engagement with domestic, public and historic gardens, and some of the challenges the Society has faced. Through the voices of the interviewees, this paper explores their associations with the Society and garden history and how their voices reflect four decades of the Society’s history.

Voices of the National oral history collection

Roslyn Burge

Speaker

41st annual conference Sydney

Bronwyn Blake & Stuart Read

Bronwyn Blake is the current AGHS National Management Committee Co-Chair with Stuart and a member of the dynamic ACT Monaro Riverina Branch Committee. Raised by a gifted gardener, the seed that grew into Bronwyn’s passion for working with plants and outdoors was sown at a very early age. Following the completion of her education degree and not enough years of wandering through the gardens of Europe and Scandinavia, she returned to Australia to work with the exceptional Australian Open Garden Scheme team of volunteers and garden owners. Bronwyn currently works in an Australian native plant nursery and in regional private gardens.

Stuart Read is a landscape architect, heritage bureaucrat and educator focussed on how heritage landscapes contribute to economies. He helps the NSW Heritage Council list and manage key places and has worked in the Australian government’s world heritage & biodiversity units. Stuart has studied gardens in Australasia, the Middle East and Europe, including a 2005 Pratt Foundation overseas fellowship tour of Spanish gardens. Among other things, he contributed a chapter to Gardens of History & Imagination: Growing New South Wales (2016).

As we celebrate 40 years since the formation of the AGHS, our hopes for the future of our gardens and cultural landscapes have been sobered - Australia’s climate is drying and warming, water becoming more scarce and expensive. Natural disasters such as bushfires and droughts are more extreme and unpredictable. Public and private green spaces are shrinking. Significant challenges indeed and yet Australia’s recent experience of enforced isolation has magnified our value of gardens and cultural landscapes in a unique way. So what will future gardeners think of our practices today? Will we be gardeners in the future? This paper will speculate about possible directions and shifts in emphasis that we may well see coming and the important role AGHS has to play.

Futurists for garden history

Bronwyn Blake & Stuart Read

Speaker

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