Auburn Botanic Gardens

This guide to Auburn Botanic Gardens traces how a rubbish-strewn stretch of the Duck River, dumped with sewage through the nineteen fifties, became a garden. It follows Eric Black, Auburn council's chief engineer, who in nineteen sixty-eight proposed turning the wasteland into gardens representing nations from around the world, and the workers who began carving the Japanese Garden's lake the next year. Money nearly stalled the project until the Whitlam government began sending development grants straight to local councils in the mid seventies.