Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily and I must return the gift.

Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants

Everybody knows there used to be emus all over Western Sydney. It’s called Emu Plains, for flip’s sake.

You used to see them near the railway line between St Mary’s and Kingswood, around Marsden Park, didn’t you? People reckoned they must still be there somewhere. But nobody I knew, from boomer to zoomer, seemed to have actually seen them recently. Even though I could swear I could remember seeing them as a kid, I was beginning to wonder if the Western Sydney Emus were a bit like the Penrith Panther. Google turned up a few stories from about a decade ago — “Emus on the loose in suburbia”, “Community outrage at ‘prison’ plan for wianamatta emus”. The odd Reddit, Instagram or Facebook post, or a community bushcare newsletter, seemed to confirm that somehow there really were still a group of emus living in the middle of suburban Penrith. So ,one rainy Wednesday afternoon a couple of months ago, with 35mm on the radar and work likely to be cancelled, I decided to go and look for myself. 

As I drove in the torrential rain, the tall double steel gates of Wianamatta Regional Park indeed gave NSW Corrective Services — technically open to visitors, but really trying to intimidate you into giving up and going home. “The only people who probably come here are horny teenagers looking for privacy, and dodgy builders trying to dump asbestos” I thought to myself. “What the fuck am I doing here?” Behind the gates a sea of ironbark, grey box and cabbage gum seedlings (and a lot of lantana) obscured the view in every direction. No emus ran out to greet me. The hard rain fell even heavier. “Screw this. One more spot then it’s time for the pub”.

The final spot on my list was a little triangle of mowed kikuyu grass either side of a concrete stormwater channel, behind which was the tall-barbed wire fence of the nature reserve. I parked the Hilux and went to have a look. Along the fire trail leading away from me, separating the Colorbond fences and the empty washing lines from the tall dark trees, a fuzzy shrub-sized blob caught my eye. Had it moved? Or was it just a spiky Bursaria bush blowing around in the storm?

Suddenly, the Bursaria bush stood up on its two long legs, stretched its long neck out to the side, shook its soaked feathers, and bent its beak back down into the grass. Its mate followed not far behind. It seemed like I had my answer. I snapped a photo, which could just as well be of the Pilliga Yowie as of a Wianamatta Emu, and scurried back to the car. 

Western Sydney is a land of contradictions — 30,000 year old campsites next to brand new houses, endangered frogs living in industrial waste. Suburbs, warehouses, farms and bush blur together like a kaleidoscope as people from every corner of the earth try to make our lives side by side. Shiny new metro stations spring out of the ground in between the paddock trees, appearing very strange indeed next to all the 1980s Mediterranean brick farmhouses and rows upon rows of greenhouse plastic disintegrating in the sun. The west has changed so much within a generation that nobody can even agree where it is.

I grew up in Marrickville, which is definitely not in Western Sydney (except if you’re looking at soil types — the Wianamatta shale bedrock extends all the way from Glebe to Penrith). But as with most people, my family connections to the West have never been very far away — convict ancestors in the 1820s in Kurrajong, grandparents living in the mountains while teaching in Granville and Green Valley, their parents retiring in Pendle Hill. (I’m sure calling Kurrajong part of Western Sydney would have felt ridiculous in 1822, but it doesn’t feel that crazy now.) As I stared at it out the car window as a child, on the way up to my grandparents’ Springwood bush oasis, the wide and open land between Parramatta and the Nepean bridge was an endless source of fascination. Kangaroos and emus roamed the plains alongside the cattle, and the city felt very far away.

But really I fell in love with the wide-open spaces of Dharug country as a result of my work as a bush regenerator, and since my first day planting Casuarina and Eucalyptus amplifolia seedlings in Luddenham on a frosty morning in July 2018, the scattered pieces of bushland left around the Cumberland Plain have been my office. These bushland remnants are basically a collection of tiny islands surrounded by a sea of concrete, leftovers that have somehow escaped axes and bulldozes over the past two centuries, and it feels like they get fewer and farther between every year.

Since the 1790s, Western Sydney has been an ever-intensifying frontier of agricultural and then industrial and suburban development. Long before the penal colony arrived, Dharug people along the Hawkesbury-Nepean were already using the fertile river-flat country for a form of agriculture based on native yams and grass seeds. Emus, along with kangaroos and other large animals, were not only hunted but actively managed through firestick farming to promote their habitat. Dharug were outraged upon seeing settlers occupying and trashing the most productive part of their lands, and the consequence was two decades of frontier warfare between colonial authorities and Dharug resistance leaders like Pemulwuy and Tedbury.

Their population decimated by massacres and disease, by the 1820s Dharug people were dispossessed of their country, subjected to cultural assimilation in church missions and government institutions, and consigned to the fringes of mainstream society — a pattern to be repeated all over Australia. But it is important to acknowledge that, even here in the part of the country most affected by colonialism, Aboriginal community and culture remain. And from Dharug language revival to contemporary land management practices inspired by cultural burning, Aboriginal culture is very much still a part of Western Sydney in the twenty-first century.

Initially, the Cumberland plain’s new settlers sought to use the land for grazing. But after the opening of the Great Western Highway in 1815 and then the railway line over the Blue Mountains in the 1870s, sheep and cattle mostly moved into the vast plains of the Murray-Darling basin and beyond. Agricultural development in Greater Sydney shifted to more intensive uses — fruit orchards, grain growing, market gardening of vegetables, chicken and dairy farms. By the mid-twentieth century, Western Sydney had developed into the fresh produce food bowl not only for the growing city, but for much of the rest of NSW.

However, these expanses of cleared and subdivided land have proved irresistible for generations of developers, whether they are looking for a site for an Amazon distribution centre or for a gated community. And generations of government policy at all levels have failed to restrain the sprawling suburbs. The stressful economics of primary production and perverse tax incentives (which encourage speculators to buy land just to leave it unused) have combined to force small farmers out of the Cumberland Plain. Meanwhile, bushland continues to be approved for suburban subdivisions, with the result being ever more loss of green spaces on the edges of the city. Comparing aerial photography taken in 1943 with current-day satellite photos of places like Penrith and Blacktown provides a sobering display of how much the city has changed since my grandparents were born.

Bushland in Western Sydney is now confined to narrow corridors along creek lines, which were never developed because they often flood in wet periods, and to a handful of fragmented bush pockets. 6 per cent of the original extent of Cumberland Plain Woodlands remains ecologically intact today, much of it in a small handful of bush reserves around current or former Australian Defence Force sites. This is a bit of a bizarre paradox — even though most people wouldn’t think of a bomb factory or an artillery testing facility as being particularly good for the environment, these activities required large plots of land and often kept large areas of bushland around them for security reasons. By the end of the twentieth century, these parcels were often all that was left in a landscape mostly cleared for farms, factories and houses.

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This brings us to the story of Wianamatta Regional Park and its resident emus. In 1941, a number of farm holdings around the St Mary’s area — over 1,500 hectares in total — were compulsorily acquired by the federal government for a munitions factory and testing complex.  At its peak, this Australian Defence Industries (ADI) facility employed over 4,000 people and had its own dedicated rail line. The story in pubs around St Marys is that, since the kangaroo and emu were the national symbols on the Australian coat of arms, Defence bigwigs thought they should be seen roaming around Defence facilities. So a program began, and emus and kangaroos were captured in Western NSW in order to bring them to military establishments around Western Sydney. A similar scheme led to the re-introduction of emus into the area surrounding Warragamba Dam in the 1970s. (Emus would previously have used the Burragorang valley (which is submerged because of the dam to migrate between inland NSW and Sydney.) The offspring of those emus at Warragamba and Wianamatta are today the last “wild” populations anywhere near the city.

The ADI site was closed in the early 1990s, triggering and a two decades’ long battle over the future of the land. The site was rapidly identified as having rare environmental value due to its relatively undisturbed nature, with soil and vegetation reasonably intact, and good habitat for threatened species of mammals, birds and insects. It was also identified as a blank slate for the sprawling city. Development titan Lend Lease bought the site in a secret deal with state and federal government for the cost of $75,000/hectare, suspiciously cheap even in the early 2000s. The company intended to turn the entire 1500 hectares into suburban subdivisions and new industrial developments. These plans were opposed by a broad coalition of local residents, birdwatchers, ecologists and others with an interest in preserving biodiversity and green space in the west. Wianamatta’s emus ultimately became a symbol for the fight to save one of the last substantial patches of bush remaining between Sydney Harbour and the Blue Mountains. After years of meetings, petitions, marches and media attention, the outcome by the early 2010s was a mixed one. Although bulldozers were allowed in for new suburbs at Ropes Crossing and Jordan Springs, 1,100 hectares (ultimately reduced to 765ha) of the ADI site was to become the new Wianamatta Regional Park. Management of the Park would transition from Lend Lease to the National Parks Office.

But the emus themselves have continued to garner controversy since the park was created. In 2013, concerns about collisions with traffic led the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) to decide to relocate the emu population to a more suitable place. However, after negative publicity and rumours of emu fatalities as a result of this process, the plan was dropped. Instead, in 2015 NPWS decided to build a fence around the emus, a move also opposed by local conservation groups. Emus in more natural settings roam over much larger areas, so confining them in small numbers within a number of fairly small habitat fragments places them in an uncertain future. There are concerns that the population will not be able to cope with floods and fires, and that they will genetically stagnate. New roads have divided Wianamatta Regional Park into several pieces, so the perhaps one or two dozen emus in different sections of the park are not only isolated from the surrounding landscape, but from each other. Western Australia famously sent in troops during the 1930s to drive emus out of crops, and eventually lost to the flightless birds. In a strange reversal of history, Wianamatta’s emus are now protected by a security guard 24/7. His job is to circle the perimeter of the Park and attempt to herd the emus back inside in case of escape. 

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For me, the continued presence of this iconic animal in the middle of suburbia was more than just a pleasant surprise on a rainy day. It was an astonishing symbol of resilience in the midst of environmental damage, and a powerful reminder of the ecological value of forgotten places. From Wianamatta’s emus, to platypus living happily in stormwater drains in Hobart, to the recovery of the European bison in the middle of the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, the damaged and leftover spaces of our urban environments turn out to be surprisingly full of life.

Wianamattas’ emus are a testament to the importance of caring for even the ordinary parts of our living world — the parts that we take for granted. Emus are celebrated in everything from the national crest to the naming of new Sydney trains. But because they are so ubiquitous, they have been poorly cared for. There are probably numerically more emus in Australia today than there were before 1788. This is because bore and dam construction in semi-arid, inland Australia has created more water sources for them. However, emus have been driven out of much of their original range in south-eastern Australia because of agriculture and urban development, with only a small handful of populations remaining in coastal NSW. I wonder if the good citizens of Jordan Springs know that they are the only people in Sydney who can see emus in their local park. Maybe they are too busy worrying about their poorly-built suburb sinking into the swamp. 

The Penrith emus’ state of ecological limbo also reflects the challenges in conserving one of their main habitats — grassy woodlands. These habitats are quite widespread, but less than 5 per cent of their original extent remains in its original condition because these vegetation types occupy the most desirable agricultural land. The majority of bird and mammal extinctions in Australia are happening because of fragmentation and degradation of this landscape type.  Setting aside grassy woodlands in conservation reserves has proved difficult, because these landscapes have all been carved up as private property since the nineteenth century. However, it is possible (at least in principle) to manage these landscapes in ways that steward their biodiversity at the same time as producing food.

The Wianamatta emus also challenge us to reconsider our black-and-white thinking when it comes to nature. Our culture is full of these binaries: there is the city and the bush, civilisation and the wilderness, wild animals vs pets, nature on the one hand and humanity on the other. This tendency to place ourselves somehow outside of the natural world is at the heart of the environmental damage we have done to this place over the past 236 years.

One of my university textbooks on environmental conservation began by stating that farm landscapes and suburbia don’t have much biodiversity value, and told us as students not to really think about them. But these emus break such a notion apart. They are neither a totally wild population, nor a fully domesticated group (like you would find at a zoo). They encourage us to think instead about how to share our home with the other life forms around us. And they inspire us to consider what could really be living over the back fence, if only we care to look.

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