Swamp City Walks: La Perouse/Yarra Bay

Taylor Coyne

A walking tour around La Perouse/Yarra Bay focusing on historical and current swamps, creeks, and watery stories.

Frenchmans Bay Reserve

SWAMP CITY WALKSSydney is not a harbour city. It is a swamp city. Beneath the sandstone and the concrete, beneath the stormwater drains and the culverted creeks, beneath the parks and the playing fields and the car parks, there is water. There always has been.Swamp City Walks is a six-month program of public walks tracing the buried, managed, and silenced waterscapes of Sydney. Each walk takes a single site and asks what happened here — to waters, to the Country, to the people who depended on both — when the city decided that wetness was a problem to be solved.These are not heritage/history walks. They do not celebrate what was built. They attend to what was lost, what persists despite everything, and what the infrastructure of the city still carries in its body, if you know how to read it.These walks are guided by Taylor Coyne and when possible, with Dharug Traditional Custodian B Hardy. Together, through a two-eyed seeing approach to encountering place, we share our experiences, our perspectives, and our understandings of these watery places' stories.LA PEROUSE &amp; YARRA BAYLa Perouse sits at the meeting place of land, freshwater and sea. Here, sandstone headlands, freshwater soaks, wetlands and creeks once fed into Yarra Bay, creating an abundant coastal landscape that sustained Aboriginal people for thousands of years. Among these waterways was Bunnerong Creek, a freshwater system that flowed north through what is now Matraville and Eastgardens before emptying into Yarra Bay. Its waters connected inland swamps to the coast, supporting rich ecosystems of paperbarks, reeds, fish, birds and shellfish, while also forming an important cultural pathway across Country.Bunnerong Creek was straightened, piped and buried beneath roads, suburbs and industrial land. Wetlands were drained, dunes quarried and shorelines reshaped for military installations, waste facilities and urban expansion. Like many of Sydney's creeks, Bunnerong survives largely out of sight, flowing through concrete channels and stormwater pipes before emerging near Yarra Bay.This walk moves through La Perouse and around Yarra Bay, tracing the meeting of freshwater and saltwater across beaches, headlands, remnant bushland and reclaimed shoreline. At its centre is the memory of Bunnerong Creek. We read the bay as a living archive: the contours that direct water to the sea, the surviving paperbarks and wetlands, the shoreline shaped by thousands of years of Aboriginal care and two centuries of colonial transformation.We encounter a creek that the city sought to erase but could never entirely remove. If the Tank Stream asks how Sydney buried its water, and Centennial Park asks how it came to control water, Bunnerong Creek asks how waters continue to shape Country even after it has been hidden. This walk considers what remains visible, what flows beneath our feet, and what responsibilities emerge when we learn to recognise water not as infrastructure, but as Country itself. MEETING POINT Frenchmans Bay Reserve, La PerouseEND POINT Frenchmans Bay Reserve, La PerouseFORMAT Each walk runs for approximately 3 hours, covering two to four kilometres on foot.NUMBERS Limited to 25 participants per walkENTRY Free to attend.WEATHER All weather. Wear shoes you are willing to get wet. Bring protective gear if forecast for rain.

Swamp City Walks: La Perouse/Yarra Bay

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Swamp City Walks: La Perouse/Yarra Bay

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