Enchanted Parklands

This article examines the religious significance that the Georges River in the Sydney Metropolitan Area (Australia) has for various ethnic groups who live within its watershed.The colonization by Anglo-Celtic Europeans professing a reformed rationalistic Christian faith led to a certain distancing between institutional religion and nature, despite the current spiritual links that many Anglo-Australian have with nature. As well, many Asiatic immigrants living around Sydney have close ties with nature thanks to the symbolic relationships that they establish between the landscape and the spiritual presence or dimensions of their respective religious traditions. This can be seen in the construction of Buddhist monasteries in the forests, the practice of meditation in nature, the mapping of geomantic forces and fluxes and Christian baptism in the river Georges.