New wetland national park ‘wonderful addition’ to conservation reserves

Professor Richard Kingsford, Ecologist, University of New South Wales

The NSW government’s declaration of a massive new national park in north-western NSW is a welcome and timely development, says UNSW ecologist Professor Richard Kingsford, who did the first comprehensive aerial surveys of the area’s waterbirds in the 1990s.

Have your say on Plans of Management

Brian Everingham, Parks Management Committee

Plans of management (plans) for reserves managed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service (NPWS) set out what can be done within reserves. It is a requirement of the National Parks and Wildlife Act 1974 that a plan be prepared for each reserve.

The draft plan is publicly exhibited and submissions are sought on it. This is where you come in!!!!

A National Park Named after Ben Boyd?

John Blay, writer and naturalist

Within days of arriving in Twofold Bay in 1842, Oswald Brierly, artist and manager of Ben Boyd’s estate there, wrote of how Boyd imagined himself the founder of a second Rome. They needed only to ‘point to various spots which are to bear our names and thru them live down to future ages’. In his euphoria on establishing an empire based in such a beautiful locality Boyd decided to change its name from Beermuna to Boyd or, optimistically, Boyd Town. But it would never achieve the lofty ambitions of his wildest dreams. He reached out for workers and briefly saw the Aboriginal people as his serfs or peasant labourers. It worked no better than his agitation to reintroduce transportation of convicts, on his way to (briefly) becoming the biggest landholder in the country, financed by capital raised in London, where interest rates were low, and used in NSW where the rates were high. As overlord bringing prosperity to the wilderness, he saw blackbirding as the answer to his problems of finding workers. But his empire failed by 1849 and he was bankrupted.

NSW Marine Protected Areas: Our Underwater National Parks

Sharnie Connell, Senior Campaigns Officer, National Parks Association of NSW

Many people are unaware that marine protected areas exist, or how they work. As the saying goes out of sight, out of mind. The value of national parks on land seems obvious, we currently have around 9% conservation area in terrestrial NSW but only 6% sanctuary in our NSW state waters.