Chapters → About a park – strange encounters Pratichi Chatterjee
About a park – strange encounters Pratichi Chatterjee
I hardly go to Sydney Park anymore, but it is extremely popular with locals in the part of inner south Sydney that I live. It is among the largest green spaces in the area, surrounded by formerly industrial and working-class suburbs of St Peters, Newtown, Marrickville and Alexandria, which have been gentrifying for a couple of decades. If you took a stroll there on a weekend you will see families with children, local dog walkers in their droves, and you might catch the park run if you are up early enough.
Prior to starting life as a park, it was the site of a former rubbish tip which was transformed into a green space through local efforts. These were led by a Sydney group, People Environment and Community Efforts (PEACE), who started a planting programme at the request of the then South Sydney Council. The first plantings in the early 1990s were not successful because of the Methane gas from the old tip, which burned the roots of the seedlings. But PEACE were committed to making a park out of ‘barren ground’. As one park-goer that I interviewed put it, Sydney Park is a ‘ ... major stepping stone for wildlife migrating through the city, for migrating birds in particular...other things like possums and bandicoots that live in places like this. It’s sort of the ‘lungs of the area’, they said. Those who do know this local history are proud and celebrate it. But like any place, the park is made of multiple stories some of which are known and celebrated, and others of which are hidden or not fully acknowledged.
In 2018, I was in Sydney Park every other day, to support the protests that opposed the NSW’s state government decision to build a motorway through the middle of the city; a motorway which once complete will surround the Park on two sides. The protest and occupation aimed to ‘save’ the Park and stall the WestConnex motorway project. It maintained a presence there for about a year in different corners of the Park. In that time I had the chance to interact with people from the surrounding suburbs and those from further away who came to support the occupation or who curiously stumbled upon the site and came in for a chat. The two situations and reflections below come from these interactions.
Policing the Beat
It was during one of these chats that a passer-by explained how Sydney Park was the site of a beat, and I believe that it still is. Eight or nine years prior to the anti-WestConnex occupations Sydney Park’s use as a gay beat triggered a very different type of confrontation (Inquiry Into Gay And Transgender Hate Crimes Between 1970 And 2010 Submission No 33, 2018).
Was a hot night, could not sleep, so I went out for a walk, somehow I was nearby Sydney Park and went in for a stroll. Been to the Park at night before, so it was not my first time. Suddenly I could see a silhouette of three men appearing about 4 meters away from me, the middle-man flashed his torch and I realised what was going on. I started running in the opposite direction. A voice came from one of the three guys; he shouted another man’s name Darryl or Darren – ‘he’s all yours...’ Then I realised I was surrounded by another two guys who started running towards me, and I ran through the bushes into the open space of the park ... It was an appalling experience ... Luckily I escaped unharmed and I will not live in their fear, actually this experience makes me even stronger.
My concern is that undercover officers participate in these activities. If they can’t handle homosexual activities, they should keep out of it and keep their aggression and homophobia to themselves.
The above quote is from a submission by the NSW Beat Project to the state ‘Inquiry Into Gay and Transgender Hate Crimes Between 1970 and 2010’. It describes how the gay beat at Sydney Park was targeted by the police. The Beat Project was established in response to the rise of violence against LGBTIQ people, including the kind of police violence seen here. In another conversation about the beat a passer-by explained, ‘They are not gay men, ... they are just men who fuck other men’. Her tone spelled moral judgement, as opposed to an advocacy for sexual fluidity. Policing gay sex in public, was clearly not only a matter that concerned the uniformed police.[36]
Unlike the local greening efforts, the children’s playground, and the park run, the beat feels like a less celebrated use of the Park. Ironically this is in an area known for its acceptance of LGBTIQ people, where businesses paraded rainbow flag paraphernalia across their shopfront to demonstrate their support of marriage equality. I am not sure how much space there is for those human relationships and sexualities, like the beat, that do not conform with and mimic the structure of heterosexual marital relations.
An Occupation
The Sydney Park occupation hosted regular activist meetings which always started with an acknowledgement of Country. That part of Sydney is Gadigal Country. The Park and its surrounds were once a Turpentine forest and included hunting grounds for its Gadigal and Wangal inhabitants. King Street, the road which I often took to walk to the Park and the occupation, was a former Aboriginal track according to some historians. The Gadigal in particular were severely impacted by settler violence and small- pox disease in the early years of colonisation leading to the death of most of its members.[37] Fast-forward to a later period of colonisation in Australia, the suburbs around Sydney Park, including Newtown and Erskineville, were among those parts of the city where Aboriginal people settled in a rural-to-urban migration in the late 1960s and 1970s. The decaying terraced housing offered by slum landlords provided low-cost accommodation.[38]
Today the area is gentrified. According to searches on Domain the rents of two-bedroom apartments around the Park range between $600-700 per week; and that is a year where we have seen rents drop because of thesocial and economic outbreaks of a global pandemic. The surrounding property market is particularly bleak for Aboriginal people on average, whose weekly household income is 33% below the ‘non-Indigenous’ median.[39] I am not sure what it means to ‘occupy’ land to protest damaging capitalist projects or to acknowledge Country, in such a context of genocide, substandard living conditions, and economic exclusion. The fundamental reality is that this land is stolen. The occupation of Sydney Park as a protest tactic, and even the acknowledgement of Country is mired in a legacy of occupation.
The above two situations are not meant to draw a moral or political equivalence between colonisation and the heterosexual policing of public space. Needless to say, the former lays the groundwork for the latter. But whilst they are politically and morally different situations they both raise questions of which realities we acknowledge, who can actually be in a place, and in what capacity they can be there. Importantly they also raise the question of what action we can, and we will take to enable a place to become something more than what it is. That means moving beyond tokenistic acknowledgements and beyond narrow liberal frameworks that require everyone to mimic the dominant social norms.
36 On the policing of beats, see Iveson, K. (2007). Publics and the City. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, Chapter 4.
37 Anita Heiss and Melodi-Jane Gibson, no date, Aboriginal People and Place, at Barani: Sydney’s Aboriginal History
38 Morgan, George (2006) Unsettled Places: Aboriginal People and Urbanisation in New South Wales. Kent Town, South Australia: Wakefield Press.
39 Australian Institute of Health and Welfare (2019) Indigenous In- come and Finance, available at www.aihw.gov.au.