# Event Details - **Event Name**: Swamp City Walks: Centennial Park - **Event Start and End Date**: Sun, 21 Jun, 2026 at 12:00 pm – Sun, 21 Jun, 2026 at 03:00 pm - **Event Description**: A walking tour around Centennial Park focusing on historical and current swamps.About this EventSWAMP CITY WALKSSydney is not a harbour city. It is a swamp city. Beneath the sandstone and the concrete, beneath the stormwater drains and the culverted creeks, beneath the parks and the playing fields and the car parks, there is water. There always has been.Swamp City Walks is a six-month program of public walks tracing the buried, managed, and silenced waterscapes of Sydney. Each walk takes a single site and asks what happened here — to waters, to the Country, to the people who depended on both — when the city decided that wetness was a problem to be solved.These are not heritage/history walks. They do not celebrate what was built. They attend to what was lost, what persists despite everything, and what the infrastructure of the city still carries in its body, if you know how to read it.These walks are guided by Taylor Coyne and when possible, with Dharug Traditional Custodian B Hardy. Together, through a two-eyed seeing approach to encountering place, we share our experiences, our perspectives, and our understandings of these watery places' stories. CENTENNIAL PARKBy the 1820s the Tank Stream was no longer being used as a water source. Forty years of a colony's waste had turned it into a drain, and the settlement of Sydney needed to look for water again. Under the direction of surveyor John Busby, the choice was set for the swampy waters stretching out from under the ridgeline of Paddington. Lachlan Swamp lay in the sandy country to the south-east of Sydney city. The swamp, so named for Governor Lachlan Macquarie, is part of a chain of freshwater wetlands held in the Botany sands and draining slowly toward Botany Bay. For Gadigal people it was a place of fresh water and food long before it was a colonial supply. The colony decided the water should run the other way. Between 1827 and 1837, convict gangs hand-dug a tunnel around three and a half kilometres long, from the swamp to a reservoir at Hyde Park. They named it Busby's Bore. For more than twenty years it was the city's main supply.This walk moves throughout the park, traversing sand dunes and wetlands, gardens, ponds, and expansive lawns. At the heart of the walk are the swamp. They survive inside Centennial Park as a stand of paperbarks and a run of ornamental ponds, landscaped into a Victorian pleasure-ground opened in 1888 for the centenary of the colony that drained it. The bore survives too, heritage-listed and sealed, a crooked hand-cut tunnel under Paddington and Darlinghurst that almost no one will ever enter. We read the presence of water as a living archive: the fall of the land between the park and the city, the contour the bore had to hold to keep the water moving, the named streets sitting on top of an unnamed tunnel.We follow the colony's second water, the supply the city dug for once it had spoiled the first. The Tank Stream walk asks why Sydney buried its water. This walk asks something harder: why, having drained the swamp, the city chose to keep it as scenery, and what is owed to the water still moving under the lawns, the ponds, and the roots of the paperbarks.MEETING POINT The Greenhouse Cafe, Centennial ParkEND POINT Lily PondFORMAT Running on the 3rd Sunday of every month, each walk runs for approximately 3 hours, covering two to four kilometres on foot.NUMBERS Limited to 25 participants per walkENTRY Free to attend.WEATHER All weather. Wear shoes you are willing to get wet. Bring protective gear if forecast for rain. - **Event URL**: https://allevents.in/centennial-park/swamp-city-walks-centennial-park/100001990295257693 - **Event Categories**: fitness, Meetups - **Interested Audience**: - total_interested_count: 0 - **Event Highlights**: - Duration: 3 hours - Location: The Greenhouse at Centennial Park - Languages: English ## Ticket Details - **Ticket Price Range**: min: 0, max: 0, currency: AUD ## Event venue details - **city**: Centennial Park - **state**: NS - **country**: Australia - **location**: The Greenhouse at Centennial Park - **lat**: -33.90251 - **long**: 151.2291626 - **full address**: The Greenhouse at Centennial Park, Grand Drive, Centennial Park, Australia ## Event gallery - **Alt text**: Swamp City Walks: Centennial Park - **Image URL**: https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events1/banners/fbc49f5bb88277c4532e8fe0594d358f09d1647427da8687c80fa24c74678fd1-rimg-w1200-h798-dcd7effd-gmir.jpg?v=1782373042 ## FAQs - **Q**: When and where is Swamp City Walks: Centennial Park being held? - **A:** Swamp City Walks: Centennial Park takes place on Sun, 21 Jun, 2026 at 12:00 pm to Sun, 21 Jun, 2026 at 03:00 pm at The Greenhouse at Centennial Park, Grand Drive, Centennial Park, Australia. - **Q**: Who is organizing Swamp City Walks: Centennial Park? - **A:** Swamp City Walks: Centennial Park is organized by Taylor Coyne. ## Structured Data (JSON-LD) ```json [ { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@type": "Event", "name": "Swamp City Walks: Centennial Park", "image": "https://cdn-az.allevents.in/events1/banners/fbc49f5bb88277c4532e8fe0594d358f09d1647427da8687c80fa24c74678fd1-rimg-w1200-h798-dcd7effd-gmir.jpg?v=1782373042", "startDate": "2026-06-21", "endDate": "2026-06-21", "url": "https://allevents.in/centennial-park/swamp-city-walks-centennial-park/100001990295257693", "location": { "@type": "Place", "name": "The Greenhouse at Centennial Park", "address": { "@type": "PostalAddress", "streetAddress": "Grand Drive", "postalCode": "2021", "addressLocality": "Centennial Park", "addressRegion": "NS", "addressCountry": "AU" }, "geo": { "@type": "GeoCoordinates", "latitude": "-33.90251", "longitude": "151.2291626" } }, "eventAttendanceMode": "https://schema.org/OfflineEventAttendanceMode", "description": "A walking tour around Centennial Park focusing on historical and current swamps.", "offers": [ { "@type": "AggregateOffer", "availability": "https://schema.org/InStock", "priceCurrency": "AUD", "availabilityStarts": "2026-09-01", "availabilityEnds": "2026-06-21", "validFrom": "2026-09-01", "lowPrice": "0.00", "highPrice": "0.00", "price": "0.00", "url": "https://allevents.in/centennial-park/swamp-city-walks-centennial-park/100001990295257693" }, { "@type": "Offer", "availability": "https://schema.org/SoldOut", "priceCurrency": "AUD", "availabilityStarts": "2026-09-01", "availabilityEnds": "", "validFrom": "2026-09-01", "url": "https://allevents.in/centennial-park/swamp-city-walks-centennial-park/100001990295257693", "price": 0, "name": "General Admission" } ], "organizer": [ { "@type": "Organization", "name": "Taylor Coyne", "url": "https://allevents.in/org/taylor-coyne/27621494" } ] } ] ```