Heather Goodall reveals Anglo-Celtic environmental activism in Sydney’s suburbs

Abstract

Heather Goodall is a key figure in Australian histories of the interaction between people and the land. Her capacity for interpreting a broad range of finely grained sources to understand places where these interactions occur is powerfully evident in Georges River Blues . The book is focused on competing ‘ Anglo and Irish ’ or ‘ Anglo-Celtic ’ desires to establish and sustain homes and workplaces amid institutional and environmental change. Conflicts or ‘ blues ’ in the southern Sydney district of Georges River arose over differing views of the need for, and modes of, environmental protection of the estuary. Goodall ’ s objective is to understand what motivated these conflicts involving resident groups with markedly different income levels trying to reverse damage to the river and its bushland, and the concomitant fate of mangrove swamps that dominated the riverscape. Georges River Blues follows on from Goodall ’ s earlier work on relationships between non-Anglo-Saxon communities and this river district, including the influential Rivers and Resilience: Aboriginal People on Sydney ’ s Georges River (NewSouth, 2009), co-authored with Allison Cadzow. The land and waters in Georges River Blues are (human) properties and community spaces as well as (non-human) ecologies sliced and diced through jurisdictional authority such as land laws, and municipal and state governance. This land and waters bear the weight of residential community building along with nationalistic ambitions for modernity and progress. The upper estuary of Georges River is a district unsuitable for settler colonial agriculture. Instead, the area was used as leisure grounds offering an escape from urbanism before World War II. After the war, the region bore the brunt of the clearing of residents from Sydney ’ s inner-city slums and the construction of factories and elite waterfront housing development. These changes brought the problems of, for example, pollution from domestic sewerage and industrial outflow. Mangrove swamps expanded