Ballast Point Park: Featured on Gardening Australia

This modest 2.5-hectare park, perched on Wangal Country in Birchgrove, sits on the bones of a former petrochemical refinery. In the local Wangal language it is called Walama — to return — and that word carries the full weight of everything Adrian McGregor and his team set out to achieve here. The park opened in 2009, the culmination of a decades-long campaign by local residents who refused to let the site become luxury apartments. Campaigner Diana Ryall, who has fought for this place since the 1980s, puts it simply: “The strength of community is enormous. And you can never get it back, once it’s developed, the land is gone.”

The layered history,  Indigenous Country, colonial extraction, industrial occupation — became the design’s foundation. Rather than erasing the past, our team embraced what the design world calls adaptive reuse: keeping industrial elements in place as quiet reminders of what came before, while weaving in a very human scale of hidden paths, intimate spaces, and unexpected vistas. Our team set themselves a further challenge: they would not cut up another site to repair this one. Instead, construction waste was recycled on the spot, packed into gabion walls that now read as landscape features. Nothing left if it didn’t have to. Most significantly, the design aimed to wind the clock back to a pre-colonial ecology, planting only species that would have originally grown on this headland. “We wanted to provide the canvas for nature to reoccupy the site.”

Costa first visited Ballast Point back in 2012. Returning now, the difference is palpable. The planting has matured into something that feels less designed than discovered. Anita Mitchell OAM, CEO of Placemaking NSW, which manages the park, credits the quality of the original design thinking for how little intervention it now needs. “It’s like urban acupuncture,” she says.

At just 2.5 hectares, Ballast Point will never be the biggest park in Sydney. But as an act of ecological restoration, community will, and design intelligence — it may be one of the most meaningful.