belt” surrounding the city with parks and reserves
had been broken by new developments, resulting in
outcries about the loss of the bush. Also, people were
forced to build on steep sandstone slopes because of
the pressure for new suburbs. This resulted in a new
architecture closely integrated with the bush. New
attitudes to the bush also coincided with the global
environment movement, in which many people
became interested in indigenous plants and animals.
Planting Dreams displays the plan for a “native
garden” designed in 1965–66 by Jean Walker and
Betty Maloney, whose bush gardens were popularized
through their small paperback books. At this time the
landscape design profession was growing and a
number of landscape architects in Sydney became
well known for their bush garden designs.
In contrast to this movement, and yet occurring
at the same time, were the new gardens created by the
post-Second World War migrants. Once again the
process of migration was generating a particular
garden style, as the new migrants from Europe went
through the painful process of relocation to a strange
country. In the 1950s, the situation for the migrants
from Europe was similar to that of the colonizers of
- The first imperative was to find food with which
one was familiar. The first settlers could have eaten
the food of the resident Aboriginal population, but
they did not understand it and so felt compelled to
grow their own in their first gardens. Similarly, the
European migrants could have eaten the food of the
resident Australian population in the 1950s, but they
could not understand it. How could one get enough
olive oil to cook with when it was only available in tiny
bottles in pharmacies? Where could one buy garlic
or eggplants or zucchini? So they, likewise, were
compelled to grow their own food. Their gardens in the
1960s were characterized by edible figs, grapevines,
olives, vegetables such as eggplants and zucchini,
garlic, chives, special beans such as borlotti beans
and cannellini beans, and herbs such as basil and
oregano, few of which were growing in the mainstream
Australian gardens.
Again, as the new migrant groups began to settle
into an Australian life, the garden was able to go
beyond the basic essentials and gardeners started to
grow exotic plants, evoking the dream of a tropical
Garden of Eden. Olive trees were now juxtaposed
against mangoes, pawpaws, banana palms and maca-
damias. Some nostalgic plants were also included
in the gardens – orchids for the Portuguese from
Madeira, bay trees for Croatians, cedars of Lebanon
for the Lebanese and walnuts and hazelnuts for the
Italians. Much of this is explored in Planting Dreams.
In the mid-1970s, a new wave of migrants
arrived, predominantly Lebanese and Vietnamese.
Many of the new Lebanese were apartment dwellers
from large cities. Their gardens became social gather-
ing places rather than produce gardens, paved or
tiled with narrow herb beds near the fences. The
Vietnamese, like previous migrant groups, saw the
garden as a place to grow food and later to explore
their art of topiary.
By the 1980s, migrants who had come in the
1950s were now quite affluent as a result of their hard
work. They were able to build new homes and create
gardens that evoked the qualities of those they
remembered from their home countries. In Sydney,
many Italian-Australians moved from Leichhardt to
Haberfield, creating exuberant expressions of Italian
design or crowding tropical palms into existing
Federation gardens.
If we are to understand these gardens, we need
to tease out the gardeners’ ideas and aspirations, both
conscious and unconscious, because embedded in
such gardens are invented traditions. This does not
mean that the traditions are untrue, but rather that
they are subtly altered by tricks of memory over time.
The need to invent traditions often occurs when
communities have been undergoing rapid change and
traditions have been interrupted. Migrant gardeners
thus continue the culture of “fresh, beautiful lies.”
The presence of the migrant garden in Australian
cities is a gift to Australian culture. Such modest,
commonplace expressions of ordinary people are part
of the ongoing historical process in which people, their
plants and the ways they are grown and used are in
continual change. However, most of the gardens will
not last. Many are ephemeral cultural expressions and
perhaps all we can do is catch their fleeting stories and
attempt to understand the depth of their meaning.^4
The Planting Dreams exhibition explores all this
and much more, highlighting this unique aspect of
Australia’s heritage.- Mark Twain, Following the Equator (Hartford: American Publishing
Company, 1897), edited extracts republished in The Wayward
Tourist: Mark Twain’s Adventures in Australia, introduction by
Don Watson (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2006). - Alejandro Malaspina’s journal of the Malaspina Expedition (1789–
1794), cited in Beatrice Bligh, Cherish the Earth (Sydney: Ure Smith
in association with the National Trust of Australia (NSW), 1973), 14. - Watkin Tench, A Complete Account of the Settlement at Port
Jackson, 1793, ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/t/tench/watkin/index.html. - Helen Armstrong, “Migrants’ domestic gardens: a people-plant
expression of the experience of migration” in Margaret Burchett,
Jane Tarran and Ronald Wood (eds), Proceedings of International
Conference, Towards a New Millennium in People-Plant
Relationships (University of Technology, Sydney, 1998), 28–35.
REVIEW
78 MAY 2017 LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE AUSTRALIA