Mount Annan new housing subdivision 2002 (Camden Images/P Mylrea) |
Winners and losers on the urban fringe
Sydney’s rural-urban fringe is a site of winners and losers.
It is a landscape where dreams are fulfilled and memories lost. The hope and expectations of newcomers are met with the promises of land developers in master planned suburban utopias.
At the same time, locals grasp at lost memories as the ruralcountryside is covered in a sea of tiled roofs and concrete driveways.
Conflict over a dream
As Sydney’s rural-urban fringe moves across the countryside
it becomes a contested site between locals and outsiders over their aspirations
and dreams. The conflict revolves around displacement and dispossession.
Sydney’s rural-urban fringe is similar to the urban frontier
of large cities in Australia and other countries. It is a dynamic landscape that
makes and re-makes familiar places.
More than this the rural-urban fringe is a zone of
transition where invasion and succession are constant themes for locals and
newcomers alike.
Searching for the security of a lost past
Richmond NSW (cc Flickr/D Whiteman) |
Local communities respond by creating imaginary barriers to ward off the evils of
Sydney's urban growth that is about to run them over. One of the most important
is the metaphorical moat created by the Hawkesbury-Nepean River floodplain around a number of the fringe communities of
Camden, Richmond and Windsor.
Fringe communities use their rural heritage to ward off
the tentacles of the Sydney octopus that
are about the strangle them. In one example the Camden community has created an
imaginary country town idyll. A cultural myth where rural traditions are
supported by the church on the hill, the village green and the Englishness of
the gentry's colonial estates.
Hope and the creation of an illusion
Outsiders and ex-urbanites come to the new fringe suburbs
looking for a new life in a semi-rural environment. As they escape the evils of
their own suburbia they seek to immerse themselves in the rurality of the
fringe. They want to retreat to an authentic past when times were simpler. It
is a perception that land developers are eager to exploit.
Ex-urbanites are drawn to the
urban frontier by developer promises of their own piece of utopia and the hope
of a better lifestyle. They seek a place where "the country still lookslike the country". These seek what the local fringe communities already
possess – open spaces and a rural countryside.
The imagination of new arrivals is set running by developer
promises of suburban dreams in master-planned estates. They are drawn in by
glossy brochures, pollie speak, media hype and in recent times subsidies on
landscaping and other material benefits.
Manicured parks, picturesque vistas and restful water features add to the illusion of
a paradise on the urban frontier.
Developers commodify a dream in
an idyllic semi-rural setting that new arrivals hope will protect their
life-savings in a house and land package.
Destruction of the dream
Oran Park housing development 2010 (Camden Images/P Mylrea) |
The dreams of a generation of ex-urbanites have come crashing down in suburbs like Harrington Park
and Mt Annan. The absence of
developer rent-seeking has meant that their dreams have evaporated and gone to dust. Manicured parks have become overgrown.
Restful water features have turned into dried up cesspools inhabited by vermin.
Paradoxically the invasion of ex-urbanites has displaced and
dispossessed an earlier generation of diehard motor racing fans of their dreams. The destruction of the
Oran Park Raceway created its own landscape of lost memories. Ironically new
arrivals at Oran Park bask in the reflected glory of streets named
after Australian motor racing legends and sculptures that pay tribute the long
gone raceway.
The latest threat to the dreams of all fringe dwellers is
the invasion of Sydney’s southwest urban frontier by the exploratory drilling of coal seam gas wells.
Locals and new arrivals alike see their idyllic surroundings disappearing
before their eyes. They are fearful for their semi-rural lifestyle.
So what of the dreams?
Sydney’s rural-urban fringe will continue to be a frontier
where conflict is an ever present theme in the story of the place. Invasion,
dispossession, opportunity and hope are all part of the ongoing story of this
zone of constant change. Read more @ Imaginings on Sydney’s Edge: Myth, Mourning and Memory in a Fringe Community (Sydney Journal)