The People's National Park: Working-Class Environmental Campaigns on Sydney's Georges River, 1950-67

Abstract

The prevailing narrative of official and academic environmental histories has been that campaigns to protect native bushland and establish national parks were initiated by middle-class advocates of distant wildernesses. Yet in the 1950s in south western Sydney, working-class activists on the Georges River were demanding conservation for native bushland and accessible greenspace at the same time as they identified industrial pollution as a severe effect of postwar industrial development. In fact, these working-class campaigners identified conservation of native bushland through a national park as a key recognition of working people in the nation. This article argues this firstly by showing that the massive post war impact of industrialisation and population expansion on the working-class area of the Georges River not only increased pollution but at the same time rapidly decreased the area of native bushland there. Secondly, it uses oral history on the life stories of individual campaigners to trace how interaction with the local river and bushland environments shaped working-class identities, just as much as did employment and factory contexts. Thirdly, this article examines the core demands of the campaign, identifying how native bushland was used as a central emblem of working-class interests, in what became a definition of a �national park� which was very different from the �Yellowstone� model. Finally, the course of the campaign is followed through its wins and losses, showing how tensions were generated among the working-class campaigners as they tried to implement their goals of an accessible �people�s national park�. Show more