This essay explores the political ecology of suburban gardens, focussing on Sydney but also drawing on insights from cities around the world. It draws on my academic studies in geography and political economy, but also on an adult life spent largely as a labourer building and maintaining gardens, parks and urban bushland.

Ramsay is long gone, but through the medium of his money he still bends the world to his will, brushing aside the concerns of perennially underpaid and overworked researchers in blind, vindictive pursuit of his foundation’s obsolete agenda, wrapping his rotting hands around the neck of modern thought and trying to drag it down with him into the stinking grave of a past that never was.

‘Millennials are, potentially, a great revolutionary force,’ writes Helen Razer in a key passage of her latest book, Total Propaganda: Basic Marxist Brainwashing for the Angry and the Young. ‘First, many of them have inherited the useful parts of so-called ‘identity politics’... Second, many of them have acquired what we call class consciousness. It would be quite difficult to be young in this era and not sense that the greater part of your effort, both in leisure and in work, is in the service of somebody else’s profit.’