Sydney 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 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.

Practical information

FORMAT  Running on the 3rd Sunday of every month, each walk runs for approximately 3 hours, covering two to four kilometres on foot.

ZINES  Participants receive a printed zine developed for the site, distributed at the start of each walk.

NUMBERS  Limited to 25 participants per walk. Registration opens four weeks before each date.

ENTRY  Free to attend.

WEATHER  All weather. Wear shoes you are willing to get wet. Bring protection if forecast for rain.

COUNTRY  Each walk takes place on unceded Aboriginal Country.