1 · Position
Twenty-two hectares on the western edge of the CBD, formerly the container terminal the dockers called the Hungry Mile. Barangaroo Reserve opened in 2015 as a naturalistic recreation of the Millers Point headland, guided by historical maps and paintings: seventy-five thousand plants native to the Sydney region, a foreshore of ten thousand sandstone blocks excavated from the site itself, and the 1836 Wall tracing the pre-colonial water's edge between the walking and cycling paths. The park reopened ground that had been closed to the public for over a century, linking Darling Harbour to Circular Quay.
2 · ⚑ The dispute, stated in full
The headland is a reconstruction of something demolished, and the objection was made plainly while it was being built. The architect Sam Marshall: *it seems an enormous amount of money to re-create something that is of the past and that didn't really exist at all… it's Disneyland.* Critics argued the cost of the artificial shoreline pushed the commercial density at Barangaroo South ever higher to recoup it — and the record supports them: approved floor space rose from 389,511 m² in 2006 to 681,008 m² by 2015, the tallest building went from a planned 92 metres to 275, and public open space fell from an intended half the foreshore to a six-hectare park. The National Trust objected to the escalations. The Library states the whole of this beside the achievement, because both are true.
3 · Why it is in the Library
Because of the name. The precinct is named for an Eora woman who resisted colonial encroachment, and the park reconstructs the shoreline as it was before the colony — a hospitality district built on an argument about dispossession, which it neither hides nor resolves. Crown Sydney, the casino hotel that became the city's tallest building, stands inside that argument. No other entry in this group carries anything comparable.
4 · Candour
The Indigenous naming and cultural programme sit alongside a development whose own designers record cultural sensitivities around dispossession as a design constraint. The Library does not treat the naming as settling the question.