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.

Keywords:

• Aboriginal
• Buddhism
• Christianity
• national park
• migrant
• nature
• religion
• Vietnamese

This paper has benefited from the research support of Ms Alison Phan and Mr Cuong Nguyen, and from the generous assistance of Mr Karim Jari and Mr Amad Mtashar of the Mandaean Cultural Club. Responsibility for the views expressed in this paper, however, lies solely with the authors.

Notes

1. This larger study is a collaboration between the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) and the Department of Environment and Conservation NSW (DEC) supported by funding from the Australian Research Council's Linkage program. Research for the present paper is intended to inform the program of in-depth interviews that will be carried out in 2006, helping us design questions that explore the parameters of possible religious-spiritual concepts and meanings that the Georges River parklands have for ethnic groups residing in the social catchment of these parklands.

2. See http://www.catholicearthcareoz.net/socialjustice.html (accessed April 2005).

3. http://wbd.org.au (accessed March 2005).

4. http://www.sunnataram.org/pagoda.html (accessed March 2005).

5. Ibid. (accessed March 2005).

6. The cults of particular Chinese gods have tended to follow the migration of people from the Chinese mainland to Hong Kong and Taiwan as well as to all the countries of Southeast Asia. Frequently this involves the movement of statues and other images of the gods between mother temples and offshoot temples in new lands. Lang and Ragvald (1993) document the ‘seeding’ of a temple in Hong Kong in 1915 from a mother temple in northern Guangdong. The cult of the Chinese Bodhisattva, Guanyin (Goddess of Mercy), has spread to Thailand where she is known as Kuan Yin and where there are now ‘numerous sacred sites devoted to her’ (Jackson 1999b, p. 269).

7. Notes by Heather Goodall from interview with Dai Le, Sydney, 9 August 2002.

8. The World Wildlife Fund is sponsoring dragon boat races on the Mekong in Cambodia as a way of drawing attention to the conservation needs of the river. See http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/where_we_work/asia_pacific/where/indochina/mekong_river/news/news.cfm?uNewsID = 16737 (accessed March 2005).

9. http://www.yardna.org (accessed March 2005).