History of our achievements

WCPS was formed in 1983 to fight to save the valley’s bushland and has campaigned ever since to achieve this.

Regional Park campaigns

Much of the Wolli Creek Valley’s extensive areas of bushland are of significant conservation value, given its inner-urban location. The bushland supports a great diversity of flora and fauna, in multiple ecosystems and provides many passive recreational opportunities for visitors. Wolli Creek is one of the few remaining creeks in inner Sydney that has retained much of its natural banks. Due largely to community effort the area has survived, and is an essential part of the region’s natural heritage.

How has it survived? The Wolli Valley was saved from most building development in the colony’s early days by its rugged terrain and by being away from the main transport routes associated with southern Sydney’s expansion. This mostly followed railway lines, over the location of which there was much politicking and probable corruption.

From 1949, the Valley was preserved but neglected because of a major road reservation under the County of Cumberland Plan. This was eventually known as the M5 East corridor. 1978 saw a NSW government road proposal for an eight-lane motorway as a surface road from Redfern to Liverpool via the Wolli Valley.

This was delayed for many years due to the negative findings of the government’s Kirby Inquiry into the proposed Kyeemagh to Chullora freight road, which recommended the preservation of the Wolli Creek bushland. Strong community objections, encouraged by the Inquiry’s report (1980) led to the formation of the Wolli Creek Preservation Society in 1983. The Society kept up a determined campaign against a motorway through the Valley (for more on this see below).

In 1988 the then Minister for the Environment, Tim Moore, announced that, with the lifting of a road reservation, the bushland areas of the valley were “now guaranteed permanent preservation”, but they were only protected by Open Space zoning.

In an effort to achieve greater protection for the Wolli Creek bushland, WCPS called for the creation of a Wolli Creek Bush Park. Following a long campaign, in 1993/4 WCPS worked with Clover Moore, then the State member for Sydney, who introduced a Bill aimed at creating a Wolli Creek Park Trust to hold the lands. But Parliament was prorogued before the Bill could be debated and it didn’t resurface. But there was now a new form of protection potentially available: a Regional Park under National Parks and Wildlife Service management.

Campaigning against motorway destruction of the Valley’s bushland continued and in 1998, following the adoption of a tunnel solution for the M5East, the then Labor Government announced the prospective establishment of a 60-hectare Wolli Creek Regional Park. The government’s proposal did not include the creek itself, nor its southern bank. In 1999 the NSW Government announced that the M5 East would go underground as a tunnel under Arncliffe. The M5 East tunnel opened in 2002 and the formation of this Regional Park seemed imminent.

The Regional Park finally began to take shape in 2003 when NPWS acquired the 8.9 ha of Girrahween Park, below the Earlwood shopping centre. But despite WCPS pressure, it was not until 2004 that the then Minister of the Environment signed off on a Plan of Management and Masterplan for the Regional Park, essentially the same as the draft plan prepared four years earlier, and just in time for a public meeting called by WCPS..

Campaigning to accelerate progress on park formation continued but the Regional Park made very slow progress, in part because of the complexities of land ownership. Over 100 different lots, some of them in private hands, were within the park boundaries. Some required subdivision before transfer, one had sensitive Sydney Water infrastructure within it and one had significant contamination. And, of course, additional resources were needed to undertake extensive surveying, mapping and negotiation with the various owners.

But there was not much evidence of action in the ensuing two years, until another public meeting was called by WCPS in 2006. “Where’s Our Regional Park?” we asked. All public owners seemed to indicate that there were no barriers to the transfer of lands to the NPWS

A generally positive and constructive meeting ended with strong expectations and some acknowledged problems: agreements had to be reached between (the then) Department of Environment and Conservation, Sydney Water, the Department of Planning, and Canterbury City Council to allow essential rezonings. and the RTA road reservation over the valley had to be lifted. Excitingly, there was the promise of the addition of Wolli Bluff at Undercliffe at the eastern gateway to the Regional Park lands.

There was then a period of very effective co-operation and support for the bushland of the park among the various State agencies, the City of Canterbury, and WCPS. Major improvements occurred and more were in the pipeline. In 2008, WCPS signed its first Memorandum of Understanding with NPWS to set the parameters for ongoing co-operation.

It was 2010 before 50% of the land proposed for the park had been acquired by NPWS. A campaign in 2010 resulted in 3,200 signatures. These were unrolled from a drum in the city, at an event calling on the Government to honour the 1998 commitment to complete the park. WCPS was convinced that, until all 50 hectares of the Wolli Creek Valley bushland were under the control of NPWS as a complete Wolli Creek Regional Park, it wouldn’t be safe enough from development and damage. Subsequent experience bore this out. It was recognised that, even then, continued vigilance would be needed as NPWS land can be taken back through Parliamentary legislation.

But, while cooperation between WCPS and NPWS continued, the period from 2014 was marked by reduced funding for NPWS and even slower progress on the needed land transfers. Acquisition of lands by the State Government continued at a snail’s pace but transfers of land already State-owned to NPWS was even slower.

Threats to the bushland have continued:

• The effective destruction of the western end of the Regional Park was envisaged in the early design stages (2009) of the massive WestConnex project (for more info see below).
• The installation of a significant industrial plant (an Odour Control Unit, OCU) within the eastern end of the Regional Park was proposed by Sydney Water in 2017. This would have broken the connectivity of the park’s bushland and destroyed a lot of it during construction. The outcome was unresolved at June 2023. For more detail see below.
• In 2022, Sydney Water contractors cut a wide swathe through part of the western gateway land to reach a sewer access shaft. A Wolli Creek Preservation Society bush regeneration site was also impacted.
• in 2023, a private owner dumped large amounts of fill onto land reserved as Open Space and part of the identified Regional Park lands, and heavily impacted another WCPS bush regeneration site.

In 2022, with the OCU in the Wolli Valley now seeming unlikely, WCPS returned again to campaigning for the completion of the Wolli Creek Regional Park. The Regional Park was still not complete in June 2023, a whole generation after the commitments to it were made. The good news was that the incoming Minns government had made a campaign commitment to Regional Park completion. For developments subsequent to May 2023 see later editions of the Wolli Creek Update and Current Campaigns.