Enchanted Parklands

Abstract

What is the religious or spiritual significance of the Australian natural environment to non-Indigenous Australians? This question is asked in relation to the parklands along the Georges River, in south-western Sydney, and some of the ethnic groups who live in the 'social catchment' of these parklands. The post-Reformation rationalist Christianity of Anglo-Celtic migrants led to a degree of institutional religious disengagement with nature, a disenchantment of places, that may tend to obscure the spiritual tone of the relationship that many Anglo-Australians clearly do have with the natural environment. Migrants from East Asia can be seen to be drawing their cultural links closer to the natural landscape as it exists in and around Sydney by engaging this landscape with wider narratives of emplaced spiritual presence. This situation is evident in the construction of Buddhist forest monasteries, the practice of meditation in the bush and in the mapping of geomantic forces and flows.

Placemaking and transnationalism: recent migrants and a national park in Sydney, Australia

“…Vietnamese Buddhists are known to go to national parks in the Sydney area to meditate (Thomas 2002: 102) and Thai Buddhist 'forest monasteries' have been established in bushland on the outskirts of the city (Byrne et al, 2006). The association of forests with meditation is deeply established within the Buddhist Theravada tradition as it exists in Sri Lanka, Burma, Thailand, Cambodia and Laos.…”

“…The invisible line orienting and connecting them to Mecca, as well as the act of praying itself, might be thought of as bringing Islam into the park or as placing the park within the cosmography of Islam. Meditating or praying are not, however, acts which colonise park space for particular religions, rather these acts occur partly because individual actors experience the park environment as conducive to spiritual experience (Byrne et al, 2006). Or, in the case of Muslims, it may simply be that they happen to be in the park at prayer time and the 'looseness' of park space allows them to pray there whereas in another public space, such as a shopping mall, football stadium, or public library, it would not.…”

“…In the early 2000s the Office of Environment and Heritage NSW (OEH) began studying how recent migrants engage with national parks in the Sydney area (Thomas, 2001;Thomas, 2002). More recently, research by OEH and the University of Technology Sydney carried out by the present authors and their co-researchers 5 , looked in detail at the way Arab and Vietnamese migrants living in the suburbs near the Georges River experience the national park there (Byrne et al, 2006;, 2010. The results of this latter study, from which the present article is largely drawn, are available in the open-access on-line publication, Place-making in National Parks (Byrne et al, 2013).…”

Diversifying Ethnicity in Australia's Population and Environment Debates

“…Latent constructs may also be understood differently across ethnic groups -including, for instance, whether they relate to the label 'environmentalist' -and how they define environmentalism (Li and Wehr 2007). (Thomas 2001(Thomas , 2002Byrne et al 2006;Goodall et al 2009;Cadzow et al 2010). Ethnic minority groups' diverse engagements (or, in some cases, non-engagements) with particular 'natural' places and environmental issues, can be attributed to alternate understandings of nature and different environmental priorities, rather than a lack of concern per se.…”

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“…In the early 2000s the Office of Environment and Heritage NSW (OEH) began studying how recent migrants engage with national parks in the Sydney area (Thomas, 2001;Thomas, 2002). More recently, research by OEH and the University of Technology Sydney carried out by the present authors and their co-researchers 5 , looked in detail at the way Arab and Vietnamese migrants living in the suburbs near the Georges River experience the national park there (Byrne et al, 2006;. The results of this latter study, from which the present article is largely drawn, are available in the open-access on-line publication, Place-making in National Parks (Byrne et al, 2013).…”