Max McIver
Under the morning shadow of Mt. Kiera, at the escarpment’s foot, Wollongong’s Botanic Gardens segues the region’s warm rainforests to its bustling beachfront city. But the community hotspot meshes more than just plants and concrete.
It’s easy to imagine such a landscape being reduced to cliché – described with mention of a paintbrush and endless colour indexes for various greens, some tinted yellow and some more blue. But with an exhaustive breadth of climates, flora, art, and community, it cannot be encapsulated so simply.
Each habitat speaks to a history of consideration and sculpture. All heights of plants are flushed, spilling over with colour in the spring, arms reaching out to envelop the periphery of local and touring audiences. From within the habitats, it is impossible to tell they are microcosms at all.
The azalea collection, beginning in 1964, now flourishes with Asiatic plants from China, Korea, and Japan, framing the famous Kawasaki Bridge – a gift given by Wollongong’s Japanese sister city, Kawasaki, in 1993.
Image courtesy of Wollongong City Library
In 1978, the rainforest collection began its goal of giving native Illawarra flora the room and attention to blossom, protecting several endangered species like the Illawarra Socketwood and the Australian Red Cedar.
The woodland and rose gardens, the Wet Sclerophyll habitat, the dryland collection, and more, all share this continued mission of conservation and admiration for native and exotic plant life.
After years of cultivation and public showings, the pathways connecting the biomes have now comfortably sunk and shimmied themselves into the soil. Just like the ducks in the waterways, people flow up and down the trails, dipping their toes into the shrubbery along the way, their eyes at home mingling with the wildlife. The viewership is a growing part of the ecosystem.
Interconnected paths now sprawl across the garden like roots, alternating between concrete, tile, and matted underbrush. Along the garden’s more rustic routes, cobbled and crunchy, the eyes hone their periphery and place the feet where they need to go. A botanical instinct lets the focus wander between the colourful tips of the trees and bushes while keeping ankles unrolled.
As patrons know, wandering the paths promises passersby aplenty. Lots of strollers, families hitting and chasing cricket balls, tourists with their chins up and heads on a swivel. You seldom see people alone in the garden.
Locals like Guido and Sandra Bainat huddle up to the escarpment to rejuvenate, sitting in an intimate encounter with the soundscape.
“It’s really serene,” Guido says.
“As you get closer to the roads, you can hear all the cars, but as you get further into the garden, you don’t hear anything, and that’s what I really like about it-”
“Birds and things,” Sandra chimes in.
“Birds, yeah, I like birds. We just saw two kookaburras over there,” Guido says, pointing at the foot of a bundle of trees by the garden’s Towri Centre.
For Sandra, the image of the garden is interwoven with personal stories.
“My sister got married in the rose garden in the ‘80s,” she says.
“I nearly got married here myself, but then I cancelled that wedding and got married at a church. But we had our reception at Gleniffer Brae.”
For many like Sandra, the garden is a cradle of memories. Wollongong’s tallest structures peer over the green clouds at Gleniffer Brae Manor, a poignant heritage site, which for some is a symbol of love and connection, for others a reminder of the stress of piano exams.
Now retired, Sandra returns to the garden on ripe, sunny weekends, making the trip from Woonona to slowly and softly wander.
“It’s just lovely to walk around and see all the flowers at different times of the year, the trees; I love the trees, the differences, the different shapes they make.”
The being, existing, taking up space alongside these different forms is the ineffable quale of the garden. Aimless walks through the rolling paths reveal story and history in every step.
The grounds are flowering with capsules of ecological and human stories from across time; trees grow with their own bend and branch fingerprints, benches honour and remember loved community members. Continually, book exchange cupboards, sculptures, meditative exercises, visitor centres, bridges and playgrounds fill the first-person, physical experience of the garden with a human touch.
Truly, the garden is so dense a reflection of the people within it, enhancing every viewpoint as more than just the objects it contains.
The latest chapter in the garden’s blooming physical story is Jenny Reddin’s Affinity, the 2025 winner of the biannual Sculpture in the Garden Wollongong contest.
“There are four cubes attached to each other and each one of those represents a part of the community,” Jenny says.
“They retain their difference, but there is a connection … We probably would fall over without each other. That’s what Affinity is about.”
Planted under the gaze of Mount Kiera, Affinity unapologetically fills space in the garden, a soulful human highlight to the landscape.
“I was gobsmacked when I saw it below Kiera,” Jenny says.
“It really needed that broad open grassy lawn area – it takes up space, but it adds to the space. It kind of punctuates that broad acreage, that broad spectrum, without interrupting it.”
The human cultivation of the Botanic Gardens is just that – a punctation of the natural space, made in correspondence with an armature of flora, fauna, and soil, in consultation with the ecosystem. Where Wollongong starts to socialise with Keira’s forests, the people enter into a physical, sensory conversation with the environment.
“I was a painter – am a painter,” Jenny says.
“I started over 20 years ago, and I got really bored being stuck on a two-dimensional surface. I wanted to break out of the canvas.”
The Wollongong Botanic Gardens, too, frolics in the dimensions of time and space and provides respite from the flat, grey, regions of the contemporary world.
Wind patters against the ear, uplifting a hushed symphony of chatter and breathy chirps, and amidst the white noise, the garden hones the most honest and free version of the self. It gives a personal experience of shape, texture, and colour, light, sound, and sensation, helping us make sense of our own positions, the space we encompass, which is becoming harder and stranger to comprehend.
The abstract, inextricable idea of the self, and the seeming impossibility of locating it and linking it to the tangible world should be completely estranged from reality.
But once you’re under the warm shade of the canopies, it’s all so clear.
