Camden Dreamtime

The Camden Progress Association and a search for a utopia

Camden is like many country towns across Australia. The civic fathers from the town's foundation in 1840 sought progress and development for the community. There was a desire for constant improvement.

The Camden News had numerous references to the town's progress, and the civic fathers founded the Camden Progress Association.  The association held the first meeting in November 1896 with the aim of town improvements. The association was still active in the early 20th century.

The notion of progress assumes that you are going somewhere or working towards some type of endpoint, a goal. What were the Camden's civic fathers working towards in the 1890s? 

One view of the Camden Progress Association was that they searched for a desired or perfect state of their world. It could be argued that they were in search of mythical utopia where everything was in a perfect or desired state.

Nepean River at Camden at a spot called Little Sandy. (CIPP)

This view of the world dates from the time of the Enlightenment and assumes that time is linear and irreversible. Ancients thought differently about the world. The Ancient Greeks and others thought the time was cyclical based around decay and rebirth.

The Camden civic fathers were from a British cultural tradition that viewed time as a linear progression. In what became known as the Whig interpretation of history, especially in the Victorian and Edwardian times,  human history was seen as the progress from savagery and ignorance toward peace, prosperity, and science.

Wikipedia states:

Whig history (or Whig historiography) is an approach to historiography that presents the past as an inevitable progression towards ever greater liberty and enlightenment, culminating in modern forms of liberal democracy and constitutional monarchy. In general, Whig historians emphasize the rise of constitutional government, personal freedoms and scientific progress.

Underpinning these notions was an accompanying cultural tradition that that world was constructed in terms of binary oppositions, for example, good/evil, black/white, big/small, dark/light, on/off, hot/cold, ugly/beautiful, right/wrong, chaos/order, life/death, love/hate, male/female, hero/coward, young/old, confinement/freedom, and others. 

One of the first to argue over life in this fashion was ancient Greek philosopher Plato and much later in the 19th-century German philosopher GWF Hegel. Here is the concept was called dialectics.

All cultures have some version of binary opposition and in Chinese philosophy and religion yin is represented by negative, dark, feminine and yang by positive, bright, masculine. 

American historian Christopher Lasch that the ideological twin of progress was nostalgia. Nostalgia involves 'the pastoral' is an idea dating from the Ancient Greeks and in literature is relates to the idyll of rural life and usually involves shepherds herding flocks of sheep in open paddocks.

In his book Hunters and Collectors, Australian historian Tom Griffiths argues there have been nostalgia wave in Australia in the 1850s, 1890s, 1930s, 1970s prompted by 'loss, depression or disruption'. In each of these waves of nostalgia, people were searching for a past.

characterised by popular yearnings for the intimate world of early colonial beginnings for lost rural places.  (Griffiths: p.197

In the 1930s the Camden community searched for the Englishness of their past, as they were in the 1840s and 1890s. Nostalgia re-appeared in Camden in the 1980s when increased urbanisation sent the Camden community in search of their own lost rural Arcadia. 

 'A Country Town Idyll' at Camden

Sydney’s urban expansion into the local area has challenged the community’s identity and threatened to suffocate Camden’s sense of place. In the face of this onslaught, many in Camden yearn for a lost past when Sydney was further away, times were simpler, and life was slower. A type of rural Arcadia, which I have called ‘a country town idyll’.

Camden John Street with a view of St John Church in the 1890s. This view was taken by Charles Kerry (CIPP)

 The ‘country town idyll’ is an idealised version of a country town from an imagined past that uses history to construct imagery based on Camden’s heritage buildings and other material fabric.


At the heart of the idyll is the view that Camden should retain its iconic imagery of a picturesque country town with the church on the hill, surrounded by a rustic rural landscape made up of the landed estates of the colonial gentry.


Its supporters created the idyll to isolate Camden, like an island, in the sea of urbanisation and development that has enveloped the town.





Curran's Hill housing development in the 1990s (Camden Images)

 These are the values that the supporters of Camden’s ‘country town idyll’ have encouraged and then expressed in the language they used to describe it.


They talk about retaining Camden’s ‘country town atmosphere’, or retaining ‘Camden’s country charm’, or ‘country town character’. They describe the town as being ‘picturesque’, or having ‘charming cottages’.


Camden is a working country town’, or is simply ‘my country town’. These elements evoke an emotional attachment to a place that existed in the past when Camden was a small quiet country town that relied on farming for its existence.



Argyle Street Camden 1938 (Camden Images)

The origins of the ‘country town idyll’ are to be found in the rural ethos that is drawn from within the nineteenth-century rural traditions brought from Great Britain, where there was a romantic view of the country, that had an ordered, stable, comfortable organic small community in harmony with the natural surroundings.


Elements of this rural culture have been variously described as 'countrymindedness', 'rural ideology', 'rural ethos', 'ruralism', and a 'rural idyll'. They have been a preoccupation of many scholars, including contemporary writers, like the Australian poet Les Murray.


Within this tradition, there is an Arcadian notion of a romantic view of rural life. There is a distinction drawn between the metropolis and the village, commonly known as the town/country divide.


This was the essence of pre-war Camden (a town of around 2000) where rural culture provided the stability of a closed community that was suspicious of outsiders, especially those from the city, with life ordered by social rank, personal contacts familial links. It was confined by conservatism, patriarchy and an Anglo-centric view of the world.

Updated 17 January 2021. Originally posted 18 November 2013.

More developments at the Camden Milk Depot

Camden Vale Milk Depot Saga

DA/2016/169 Camden Council

The District Reporter 24 June 2016 p3

There have been more developments in the saga of the Camden Vale Milk Depot story.

Sydney identities Mr Alan Jones and Mr Mark Latham have been drawn into the controversy. 

Listen to a conversation between Alan Jones and Mark Latham on Sydney Radio 2GB and read a letter to the editor of the Camden Narellan Advertiser by concerned resident Mr J Wrigley. 

Mr Jones has stated that he has received a stream of emails and phone calls on this matter and other issues related to the town centre development.

Mr Jones and Mr Latham paid a visit to Camden to inspect what the fuss is all about. Lee Abrahams from The District Reporter has published a story about their visit which has appeared in a recent issue of the newspaper. (24 June 2016)

It is advantageous that according to The District Reporter (11 May 2016) and reports in the Macarthur Chronicle (26 April 2016) the mayor's position on these issues seems to have shifted from her earlier statements about the development. 

Camden Vale Milk Depot (Camden Images)

The handling of this development application by Camden Council has been unfortunate. The notification for the original DA was not publicly advertised in the press and then there seemed to be considerable confusion around the publication exhibition period dates. 

The council's approach on this matter has done nothing to narrow the trust deficit that emerged in 2014 with the community consultation process for the town centre re-development.

The council's continued politicisation of these type of development matters is regrettable. The council needs to build confidence within the community.

Read more on the Camden Vale Milk Depot

Hope and loss on the urban fringe

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

 As Sydney’s urban sprawl invades fringe communities locals yearn for a lost past and hope for some safe keeping of their memories. They use nostalgia as a fortress and immerse themselves in community rituals and traditions that are drawn for their past. They are drawn to ever popular festivals like the Camden Show and Campbelltown's Fishers Ghost Festival which is celebration of the rural heritage of Sydney’s fringe.


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)

Dreams are also destroyed on  Sydney’s urban frontier for  many new comers.  Once developers of master-planned estates have made their profit they withdraw. They no longer support the idyllic features that created the illusion of a suburban utopia.

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)