U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 114

Healing the harbour foreshore The making of ’s new headland park

Julia Dowling [email protected]

Barangaroo Reserve, part of the redevelopment of the former container wharves at East , Sydney, NSW, is a major project in an iconic location. Originally proposed to be a hard-edged landscape which retained evidence of the site’s industrial past, dramatic changes in the NSW government’s approach have resulted in the attempted reconstruction of the natural headland that existed there at British settlement. Justification by the government for the shift in design philosophy adopted a tone of moral redemption and obligation, proclaiming that the reconstruction of a natural headland would 'heal' the foreshore and 'remove a scar' from the city, and leant heavily on the perceived virtues of restoring a natural landscape over conserving the site’s maritime industrial cultural landscape.

The creation of Barangaroo Reserve reveals a peculiar icon-making process, one that throws into sharp relief the dichotomy at the heart of Sydney’s identification with its famous harbour landscape: the working industrial harbour on which the city grew and thrived, and the so-called natural landscape it replaced. It also invokes the question of what natural means in Sydney’s post-colonial landscape.

By tracing the making of Barangaroo Reserve, the paper reveals that its stated meanings may not be as morally straightforward as claimed, and this raises questions for a project touted as a major new icon for Sydney. It suggests that the replacement of one type of landscape with another, in the name of a moral obligation, is replete with complexities that demand consideration of the broader meaning of the landscape and its representation over time.

Keywords: landscape; restoration; urban design; cultural landscape

Introduction

The creation of Barangaroo Reserve is the story of a clash between competing narratives of Sydney and its iconic harbour. On the one hand, the physical fabric and form of the former container wharves of East Darling Harbour on the western side of Sydney’s CBD were described as a testament to thousands of working lives in the maritime trade which sustained the city until relatively recently. U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 115

On the other, the wharves were condemned as evidence of the destruction and vandalism industry wrought upon the original harbour landscape.

This paper explores the formation of the park using the theoretical frameworks of landscape and environmental or landscape restoration. In language and intentions, the Barangaroo Reserve project, designed by Peter Walker & Partners landscape architects with Johnson Pilton Walker, ostensibly sits within the international practice of landscape restoration, in which natural landscapes are restored or reconstructed based on assumed past conditions (Elliot 1997; Higgs 2003; Foster 2005). In cultural heritage terminology, landscape restoration is really ‘reconstruction’, the practice of ‘returning a place to a known earlier state…distinguished from restoration by the introduction of new material into the fabric’ ( ICOMOS, Article 1.8).

The discourse around such projects focuses on the moral implications of our relationship with nature, emphasising the duty to repair the natural landscapes that industrialisation and urbanisation have damaged or destroyed. In essence landscape restoration projects involve a judgement of value, of what is more important, and are therefore an expression of that value (Foster 2005). While the narrative for Barangaroo Reserve adopted the language of restoration to rationalise the removal of the site’s maritime industrial landscape, on examination the project’s justification is not as morally straightforward as claimed. This has implications for a project charged with being a new icon for Sydney, and for landscape restoration projects more broadly. It suggests that the replacement of one type of landscape with another, in the name of a moral obligation, is replete with complexities that demand consideration of the broader meaning of the landscape and its representation over time.

Methods

The paper explores the concepts of landscape and the moral value of nature and natural landscapes in a post-colonial urban setting using the case study of Barangaroo Reserve. The concepts are examined using the methods of discourse analysis and iconographical study. Discourse analysis provides the means of understanding how the natural headland design for the park came about, how it was justified, and what it may, in the end, mean as a landscape. Iconographical methods are used to examine how these meanings have been imprinted into the landscape as built. Archival research was used to investigate and test the claims made about Barangaroo Reserve.

The Value of Nature and Landscape

Landscape has been theorised as the product of the co-constitutive relationship of a physical thing in the world and our understanding of it (Mitchell 2000). This understanding or meaning is subjective, the product of our ever-changing ways of seeing and understanding the world and our place in it. It is mediated by culture and by its context in time and space (Massey 1995). For WJT Mitchell (1994, 2), the subjectivity of landscape makes it ‘an instrument of cultural power’, where its depiction and physical form can be manipulated to hide or normalise particular narratives and represent an artificial world as if it were ‘simply given and inevitable’. But to believe that a place or thing holds a single meaning at any one time can be an overly simplistic view of people’s relationship to landscape. While one narrative may dominate, or be made to dominate, this cannot control the U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 116

diversity of individual memories, attachments and experiences that may be associated with a landscape. Attempts to establish a ‘fixed and discrete set of meanings’ can be ‘inevitably altered, rendered mobile and open to alternative and even contradictory readings’ (Atkinson and Cosgrove 1998, 30).

Natural landscapes are loaded with cultural meanings and values that have sought to separate them theoretically from cultural landscapes. Natural landscapes are seen as inherently better—‘healthier, more durable, more beautiful and morally superior’—than cultural landscapes (Lowenthal 2013, 5). David Lowenthal (2013, 6) likened this belief to an article of faith, rooted in Judeo-Christian theological concepts of Eden as ‘the fruitful garden of an originally perfect pristine world’. Nature itself has been theorised as having an intrinsic value, with environmental philosopher Eric Katz suggesting that the value of nature (“the ecosystemic processes of the natural world” (1995, 274)), arises from its autonomy and independence from human intention. This value is inherent and cannot be created, and once humans intervene it is lost. Therefore any human intervention into nature is a moral act, in that it instantly transforms nature into a product of human intentions and prevents it from following its ‘unplanned courses of development, growth and change’ (Katz 1993, 230). Katz’s construction of value is not without its problems. It is difficult to reconcile it with a more nuanced understanding of the pre-colonial relationship between humans and nature, for example (Denevan 2011; Langton 1996). However, it remains a foundational explanation of the intrinsic value of nature.

Katz’s construction of nature’s value has the logical conclusion that natural areas have to be protected from human interference to be preserved in some kind of ‘pure’ state. Yet others believe that the value of nature can be regained and natural landscapes restored, and that the destruction wrought by development means that we have a moral obligation to restore natural areas that have been lost (Kane 1994; Higgs 2003). Landscape restoration projects are generally presented as honourable endeavours, morally beyond reproach (Elliot 1997; Foster 2005; Trigger et al 2008; Smith 2013). Jennifer Foster (2005, 336) notes that restoration projects often have ‘an undercurrent of redemptive motivation’. By restoring, we will atone for wrongs done to the environment in the past. Restoration can also be viewed as the response to an ‘inescapable obligation’ (Kane 1994, 79) to repair degraded natural landscapes.

Restoration places a higher value on what the landscape was like in the past and assumes that it had some intrinsic value of more worth than other landscape forms (Elliot 1997). The dilemma of what exactly constitutes this higher value remains unresolved. If the intrinsic value of nature lies in its autonomy, as Katz proposes, then restoration cannot recover this value once lost. Restorers argue that ecological accuracy, closeness to historical form and the participation of humans in landscape restoration can recover nature’s value, and that therefore restoration is a morally justifiable approach (Higgs 2003; Light 2002).

However, landscape practices have long struggled with historical felicity and the desire to make nature useful. Early versions of preserved nature in Victorian England, such as Hampstead Heath, saw nature arranged like a garden, ‘thoroughly humanised, intensely managed’ (Lowenthal 2013, 10). The restored landscapes were inspired not by wilderness, but by pastoral paintings, where the landscape was reformed to suit picturesque ideals. Landscape restoration projects, while having different aims and methods, have similar conceptual results, with nature arranged for aesthetic appreciation and usefulness as much as any ecological concerns (Smith 2013). The final product is a U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 117

type of cultural landscape, a particular vision of the world loaded with human intentions—not nature as it is, but nature as it should be.

Restored landscapes do not replace nothingness. A layered landscape, with its topography, structures and details developed over time, is a repository of public history which provides tangible evidence of past lives and values and attitudes to the world (Mitchell 2000; Hayden 1995). Thus an industrial landscape holds evidence of human, labour, struggle and achievement, while a Victorian parkland landscape like Hampstead Heath holds evidence of the twin beliefs in the good of nature and the need to control it. The diversity of meanings people associate with a landscape means that any intervention into it has a moral dimension. How robust are these associations and meanings if their physical traces are lost? As discussed in the next section, the landscape of Millers Point was a layered cultural landscape when the redevelopment of the East Darling Harbour wharves was announced.

The Remaking of Millers Point

The industrialisation of Millers Point began in the early nineteenth century. Due to the steep topography of the ridgeline that formed the western boundary of The Rocks, it was not until the 1820s that early colonial industries arrived at the point, in the form of stone quarrying (Galloway 2006, 10) and three windmills for grinding grain owned by John Leighton, ‘Jack the Miller’ (Fitzgerald 2008). A scattering of houses and tracks accompanied the windmills, forming a sparsely developed landscape. The steep topography of the point itself was a barrier to maritime industry and it was not until 1836 that the first wharf was recorded on a map (Figure 1).

U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 118

Figure 1: William Wilson, Map of the Town of Sydney, drawn & engraved for the N.S.W. General Post Office Directory by permission of the Surveyor-General. 1836, Map (detail), 17.5 x 38.8 cm. National Library of Australia, Canberra.

By the end of the century, the shoreline of Darling Harbour, Millers Point and Walsh Bay had developed into a shambolic collection of privately-owned wharves and reclamation of the tidal mud flats. Following an outbreak of the plague, the shoreline was formalised and regularised by the NSW government’s Sydney Harbour Trust (SHT) through the construction of state-of-the-art finger wharves and shore-sheds. The topography of Millers Point itself was altered with its western and northern slopes cut away to create more wharfage, resulting in dramatic sandstone cliffs. Over time as the industry shifted to containers, the space between the wharves was reclaimed by the SHT’s successor, the Maritime Services Board (MSB) and in the 1960s and 1970s the whole became a single concrete apron for container ships. A harbour control tower was built at the point in 1974, providing a landmark for the point and an undeniable maritime industrial presence that looms over the western harbour.

By the time the major redevelopment of East Darling Harbour was announced in 2005, a cultural landscape existed there that described over 180 years of maritime industry and working lives in its built structures and landscape modifications. In recognition of this, the design for the East Darling Harbour didn’t begin with a natural headland in mind. The original design competition brief required the design to reflect qualities intrinsic to Sydney, particularly the prominence of the harbour and the way it had defined the city’s character and history since British settlement (SHFA 2005). The brief envisaged that the ‘working harbour’ uses of the site would remain to some extent, with the harbour control tower, an overseas cruise terminal and interstate ferry terminal retained. During the second stage of the competition former Prime Minister Paul Keating joined the design jury and it is to this moment that the reconstruction project can be traced.

Keating had a singular vision for Sydney’s famous harbour, which Barangaroo provided an opportunity to realise. He wanted to restore the ‘archipelago of headlands’ in the western harbour back to a state approximating what it may have looked like in 1788, when the First Fleet arrived at Sydney Cove (D*Hub 2007; Stephens 2009). To ensure that his vision prevailed, Keating set about redefining the history of the point and its value to Sydney. He created a new narrative by which the industrial history of the site was recast as an aberration, a meaningless interruption in a longer continuum of Sydney Harbour’s natural history. In an interview for the Daily Telegraph, Keating claimed that “If we restore the headland and take off extraneous pieces of building work, the unimportant industrial bits, the natural constellation of headland islands comes back” (in Vallejo 2008).

Keating had a direct influence on the planning process, being appointed to the development’s design panels, and his narrative was picked up and reinforced in successive planning documents, as well as by government ministers and premiers who made Keating’s words their own. The first planning approval for the project required ‘the reinstatement of a headland at the northern end of the site with a naturalised shape and form’ (Sartor 2007).

The narrative adopted the language of landscape restorers in putting the case for the headland’s reconstruction, talking of redemption and obligation. Barangaroo Reserve was cast as offering the last chance to repair or ‘heal’ the scar the container wharf and maritime industry had left on the U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 119

foreshore. This ‘scar’ was depicted with some violence by the then NSW Premier who claimed ‘It’s been a wasteland and they started with the headland and carved it, killed it, turned it into an industrial site’ (Frew 2008). Keating tied the reinstatement of the headland to a moral obligation to restore what had been ‘destroyed’. In a piece written for the Sun-Herald in 28 February 2010, he characterised Barangaroo Reserve as the opportunity to heal a place ‘vandalised’ by its industrial past, ‘going a long way to remediating the wilful damage done by this self-serving authority [the MSB]’ (Keating 2010). The then NSW Minister for Planning, Frank Sartor, epitomised this narrative with the claim that the park would be a ‘healed, restored part of Sydney’ (NSW Parliament, 2008).

The reconstruction of the headland would see a lost natural landscape returned, and the true value of Sydney’s iconic harbour reinstated. Underpinning this was a belief in the inherent value of the natural landscape and the moral obligation to atone for the destruction that has been wrought upon it. Keating expressed his vision thus: ‘I believe there is only one compelling heritage interest…the natural topography—the pre-colonial configuration of the foreshore’ (D*Hub 2007). He argued that the natural features of Sydney are what define it—“the residual natural nature of the foreshore…characterises Sydney Harbour and defines Sydney with it” (D*Hub 2007). In a 2007 lecture, Keating set about connecting this natural landscape of the harbour to the very identity of the city itself.

It’s got a beauty; it’s old—you know it’s old. This is a very old—geologically, one of the oldest parts of the world; and, if you live in Sydney, of course you know it. Those of us who love the sandstone, the age of it, the fractures, the fissures, all the things that mark it out and give you that sense of where you are (D*Hub 2007).

The discourse around the development of Barangaroo Reserve enforced the idea that the reconstruction of a natural landscape had greater moral claims than other landscape approaches, and that the need for this reconstruction outweighed consideration of the site’s maritime industrial cultural landscape. But what exactly is the moral value of reconstructing the headland?

The Making of a Colonial Landscape

If the moral justification of the project rested on the belief in nature’s intrinsic value, the park’s design would have had to achieve at least two things necessary for landscape restoration projects: ecological accuracy and historical fidelity. Examination of the project’s planning documents and the park landscape now completed reveals that there is little evidence of these. The planning application documents for the project and statements by the then Premier Morris Iemma (AAP 2008) demonstrate that the shape of the headland’s shoreline was based on an 1836 map (Figure 1) drawn long after colonial development had come to Millers Point, and which recorded the first commercial wharf at the point. The documents also reveal that the headland’s form and landscape design were inspired by colonial imagery, particularly c1821 drawings by Major Taylor (Figures 2 and 3), which were reproduced over and over in the project’s planning reports and other documents (BDA 2009; JPW and PWP 2010). These images show the series of coves and inlets that sheltered the new colony and the sandstone and green that characterised the headlands. U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 120

Figure 2: Major James Taylor, Part of the Harbour of , and the country between Sydney and the Blue Mountains, . c1821, Aquatint, 39.5 x 58 cm. State Library of NSW, Sydney. Miller’s Point is on the right of the image, with the two windmills. U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 121

Figure 3: Major James Taylor, The entrance of Port Jackson, and part of the town of Sydney, New South Wales. c1821, Aquatint, 39.5 x 58 cm. State Library of NSW, Sydney.

That the park would be a truthful replica of the natural headland as it was in the past was reiterated throughout the project. Keating claimed in September 2009 that ‘[t]he designs currently proposed are based on the last drawings we have and they are as close as humanly possible to those drawings’ (in Bibby 2009). However, it is clear from the planning documents that the form of Barangaroo Reserve is not particularly faithful to the historical record (BDA 2009; SHFA and MG Planning 2009). In a Design Strategy Review report for the project, Conybeare Morrison International (2008, 4) admitted that the earlier headland was probably much smaller than that proposed for the park but that it could still have a ‘natural’ feel ‘without necessarily being cut back to the 1836 shoreline extent’ (emphasis added). The highly manicured and re-formed landscape of Mrs Macquaries Point in Sydney’s Domain informed the design, with the Request for Proposal (RFP) documents from 2009 stating that the park’s character should

reflect the rugged sandstone topography of Sydney Harbour and include plantings of large figs (Moreton Bay and Port Jackson figs) and native trees similar to the parklands at Mrs Macquarie’s Chair (BDA 2009, 12).

There is also little evidence of ecological accuracy at Barangaroo Reserve, or a commitment to restoring the landscape in any way other than aesthetically. Even though the park includes native trees and a rocky shoreline, the grade of the headland, paths and shoreline have all been designed to suit an urban public park. The headland shape has been formed not by outcrops of sandstone, but by concrete retaining walls and fill over a 300-space carpark and a concrete-framed ‘cultural space’. A glass and steel lift connects the carpark to the top of the park, and the north-eastern section of the U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 122

park is interrupted by an open gash over the carpark entrance. The natural reconstruction is essentially skin deep—the park is a thin layer of nature over concrete, cars and culture.

The plants have been selected generally for their ‘nativeness’ to Sydney Harbour, but not from any detailed study of the ecological system that may have once graced the headland. The integrity of the process has been further eroded by the addition of four ‘iconic’ species not native to the harbour— Gymea lily, spotted gum, Sydney blue gum, water gum—and one, a bottle brush, Callistemon citrinus, chosen because it was named ‘Anzac’ and the park opened during the centenary of Gallipoli (BDA 2015).

While the project’s main works application claimed that the park would have ‘natural heritage advantages’, the National Trust pointed out in response that this claim ‘is made, but isn’t proven anywhere’ (National Trust NSW 2010, final page). No documents that explained how the headland would be natural were submitted with the application, or at any other stage of the project. The rigour required for recreating ecological systems (Higgs 2003) has not been seen at Barangaroo Reserve. There was a complete lack of explanation of the characteristics of a natural headland in Sydney Harbour in any terms other than aesthetic.

Essentially the project was an expression of Keating’s aesthetic preferences. He claimed that the hard geometry of the site’s container wharf ‘jars with the romantic nature of every Sydney headland, bay, point and inlet, characterised by sandstone and green’ (Sun-Herald, February 28, 2010), and congratulated the NSW government for its ‘vision and courage’ in taking a step towards ‘restor[ing] the western harbour to its original beauty’ (Keating in Keneally 2008). Keating’s views are not without precedent. The belief in the natural landscape’s beauty and its importance to Sydney has long been emphasised in efforts to conserve the sandstone foreshores of Sydney Harbour. Protection of the scenic qualities of the harbour’s headlands and eucalypt bushland were a major early focus of the National Trust in NSW (Logan 2015).

The images and values that underpinned Keating’s vision and used by the park’s designers had some troubling aspects. In describing the headland’s ideal and most beautiful state, the project relied on colonial depictions of the harbour landscape. It appeared that the obligation to restore was not for ecological reasons, but rather for a romantic vision of the harbour as it appeared to the nation’s colonial forebears. Keating saw Barangaroo as the chance to restore the landscape Captain Arthur Philip saw when he arrived at Port Jackson in 1788:

We now have a once-in-200-year opportunity to call a halt to the kind of encroachments we have seen in the past. A once-in-200-year opportunity to leave something Arthur Phillip might recognise were he somehow, mystically, to return. (D*Hub 2007)

In a tour of the site given to journalists in August 2008, Iemma indicated that he wanted to see the northern point ‘converted into a wooded headland reminiscent of what the first settlers would have seen when they sailed into the harbour’ (Frew 2008). Landscape images, like landscapes themselves, are cultural products which channel the political or social context of the time (Cosgrove and Daniels 1988; Mitchell 1994). They can be an instrument of power that “silences discourse and disarticulates the readability of landscape in order to carry out a process of institutional and political legitimation” (Mitchell 1994, 3). The landscapes by Major Taylor and other colonial artists show a landscape ordered for aesthetic appreciation, with gentle slopes of green, punctuated by wild outcrops of U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 123

stone and trees in the distance. The images ‘cultivate the illusion of a natural place’ (Carter 1987, 251) and yet allowed imperial power to be ‘naturalised’ by remaking the colonised landscape in its own image and its own aesthetic conventions (Mitchell 1994). The images are colonial artefacts through which the harbour landscape, by the use of picturesque conventions and preoccupations, has been made British. In relying on these images for inspiration, Keating’s vision for Barangaroo Reserve is imbued with meaning—a colonial image of the landscape made real.

The Barangaroo Delivery Authority (created after the design competition to oversee the development) and Keating (Davies 2015) belatedly claimed that the intent behind the park’s design was to honour the landscape’s first inhabitants, but there was no mention of this prior to a major review of the project in 2011 (Sussex and Penn 2011). Keating himself had described the renaming of the site to ‘Barangaroo’, after a Cammeraygal woman who was a powerful figure in early Sydney, as ‘Aboriginal kitsch’ (Pearlman 2006). Involvement of Aboriginal people in the project since has had its share of controversy, with a circle of ‘phallic’ standing stones placed on the foreshore offending some traditional owners (Boney 2014; Hutchinson 2014). It is also undeniable that by its foundation in colonial images and descriptions of the harbour, Keating’s vision is closely tied to the colonial experience, which was exploitative of the landscape and its inhabitants.

If we accept that the product of the Barangaroo Reserve design is cultural, then this project has replaced one type of cultural landscape with another. If that is accepted, then what is at stake when one landscape is replaced with another is that physical evidence of public history and identity is erased and intangible attachments to that landscape are severed. Though that history may remain recorded in other forms, the everyday physical evidence that the landscape provides—visible every day to everyone in a city, the most tangible way for that history to be seen and found—will be lost.

For Hayden (1995) the very identity of a place and a community is in danger if the physical traces of its past are lost. While Barangaroo Reserve attempts to be a natural landscape, it conceals a cultural landscape that has been shaped by human intervention over thousands of years. The history of the neighbouring communities of Millers Point and Dawes Point is closely tied to that of the Barangaroo site and the industrial landscape of the Darling Harbour and Walsh Bay wharves. The entirety can be seen as a cultural landscape that has value to those who have worked and lived there and also to the broader community in terms of the role the wharves had in the development of Sydney.

This has implications for landscape restoration projects more broadly. If a cultural landscape is the physical expression of a place’s and community’s identity and history and if that identity has value, then a project like Barangaroo Reserve has the potential to commit a moral wrong by destroying (or at least damaging) that value. The nature preservation and landscape restoration projects are both founded on the obligation to preserve or restore something that has an intrinsic value (Katz 1993; Elliot 1997; Higgs 2003). However, if the restoration removes another type of value, then its moral foundations become somewhat unstable. In the case of Barangaroo Reserve, the moral value of reconstructing the harbour’s pre-industrial landscape, why it was something Sydney was duty bound to do, was never explained or substantiated. Nature has not been restored and the authentic reconstruction, which was to be faithful to the lost harbour landscape, is superficial at best. In truth Barangaroo Reserve is an aesthetic preference dressed up as a chance for redemption, without its true implications ever being fully considered or admitted. U H P H 2 0 1 6 I c o n s : T h e M a k i n g , M e a n i n g a n d U n d o i n g o f U r b a n I c o n s a n d I c o n i c C i t i e s | 124

Conclusion

Barangaroo Reserve finally opened to the public in August 2015, with its natural landscape intentions somewhat undermined by the presence of the harbour control tower looming over the site. Demolition of the tower is slated to happen in 2016 (Barlass 2015), and erasure of the site’s maritime industrial history will be complete. This act will remove an opportunity for a more complex reading of the present, where the site’s so-called natural and industrial histories as part of Sydney Harbour could be seen side by side.

Eric Higgs (2003, 279) has argued that “[d]esign specifies intention, meaning that our biases and dispositions and practical concerns are revealed through design: the cards are well displayed on the table”. While its development came loaded with claims of obligation and promises of redemption, in the end Barangaroo Reserve is a statement about the aesthetic preference of a former Prime Minister who wielded extraordinary power in the park’s design. The use of an 1836 map and landscapes by colonial artists, and the aesthetic focus of the landscape design, indicates that the park’s design is derived more from the picturesque thrill of the images themselves than a commitment to reconstructing a natural landscape. Headland Park will also obscure the 200-year industrial past of the place, one deeply connected to the history of the neighbouring Millers Point and Dawes Point communities, resulting in the loss of physical evidence of public history and public endeavour. While the justification for the project, as conveyed in the discourse, was that the park would ‘heal’ the foreshore and right the wrongs perpetrated by the ‘vandalism’ of its industrial past, in truth Sydney’s new natural headland is deeply colonial and not particularly natural.

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