Australian landscape art as a contributor to environmental management planning at Berrys Bay (Sydney Harbour)

ABSTRACT

This article examines the landscape artworks of a prominent Sydney Harbour site as an aid for long-term environmental management planning. One hundred and fifty-one Australian paintings of the scenery around Berrys Bay – beginning at the earliest days of settlement, and held since in eminent collections – offer data on subject matter, changes in these subjects over more than two centuries, and viewpoints that differ from those offered by current techniques to measure visual amenity. The viewing by a large number of this country’s renowned landscape artists around Berrys Bay is in the environmental context of Sydney Harbour rather than of Waverton Peninsula, and from the waterway rather than the land. The artworks show progressively pioneering, industrial and recreational boats set in a background of an increasingly unnatural (urban) landscape – results which reinforce the ecological conclusion that the area is, contrary to public perception, a cultural rather than natural landscape. This dictates that management should be restorative rather than preservative in approach, a matter then mainly for landscape architects studiously employing ecological design principles. The enduring interest in the cultural landscape may well also garner direction for heritage conservation measures.

KEYWORDS:

• Landscape art
• visual amenity techniques
• ecological design
• Sydney Harbour conservation

Acknowledgements

The work was undertaken as part of the planning by Pacifica Developments Pty Ltd on land at Berrys Bay, NSW. The author is grateful for the advice and encouragement also provided by the late Betty Churcher AO (former Director of the National Gallery of Australia), Professor Ray Green (Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning, Melbourne University), Dr Ian Hoskins (Historian, North Sydney Regional Council), Dr T. H. Kirkpatrick (Australian Environment International), Dr Michael Martin McCarthy (former Murdoch Professor of Landscape Architecture in the School of Environmental Planning at Melbourne University) and Michelle A. Gane (Institute for Future Environments, QUT). The journal’s anonymous referees also offered valuable advice.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.