Auburn Botanic Gardens
Riverside gardens built over old clay pits, with a Ryoan-ji style Japanese lake garden, sunken rose garden and native fauna reserve.
Location
About this audio guide
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.
This audio guide was created using AI.
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