Location
Sydney Olympic Park is a large sports and entertainment complex in the West of Sydney. It is also an official suburb of Sydney, commonly known as Olympic Park but officially named Sydney Olympic Park. Sydney Olympic Park is located 16 kilometres west of the Sydney central business district, in the local government area of the Cumberland Council. (wikipedia)
History
The Wangal clan of Indigenous Australians lived in the area before British settlement. The area was called “The Flats” by a scouting party shortly after the arrival of the First Fleet in 1788. It became part of the Newington Estate in 1807, which was acquired by John Blaxland. The Government acquired some of the land for an aged women’s home in the late 19th century. Much of the land was reclaimed from the river and wetlands by landfill.
In the mid-1980s, an area bounded by Australia Avenue and what are now Herb Elliott Avenue and Sarah Durack Avenue was promoted as a ‘technology park’ called the Australia Centre. However, apart from a few relatively high tech businesses like AWA Microelectronics, BASF, Philips and Sanyo, the idea did not catch on and the Australian Technology Park is now in Eveleigh. In any event, a decade later the entire area became the site for the Sydney 2000 Olympics.
Before its transformation, a large part of Olympic Park was derelict former industrial land, after more than a century of industrial and military activities on the site. The site was once home to a brickworks, abattoir and an armaments depot as well as being the site for eight of Sydney’s rubbish dumps. These activities resulted in a highly contaminated site with little natural ecology and a fragmented stream corridor. Sixty-five percent of the soils were required to be excavated and contained on-site. The site did have some positive attributes that PWP Landscape Architecture enhanced in the design: 15 miles of continuous waterfront; various historic buildings and landscapes; an almost unspoiled 124-acre aboriginal forest; major areas of mangrove swamp; bird sanctuaries; and surviving endangered species like Golden orb spiders and the Green and golden bell frogs that resided in a 70-acre historic limestone quarry, the Brick Pit. Millennium Parklands was and is a project that matches the scale of the city, dealing with landscape as the system that sustains urban life, the Olmstedian “lungs” known these days as “green infrastructure” a component of the urban condition rather than its native opposition.
(wikipedia)
Places of Interest
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