![]() “As I had not been able to see the garden myself, when I returned to Adelaide I met with Japanese residents in Adelaide, Adelaide City Council member Ross James, and other city officials. At this time, I also came to learn that some Japanese residents in Adelaide were hoping to refurbish the garden to make is look more like a real Japanese garden. ![]() ![]() “During our conversation, we agreed that this commemorative project would not have been successful without the cooperation of Japanese volunteers living in Adelaide, and that we hoped that it was able to strengthen the connection between citizens in Adelaide and Himeji. “On the flight home, I spoke extensively about it with the former mayor of Himeji, Mr Matsuji Totani,” he says. While other commitments on the delegation’s busy schedule prevented him from paying the garden a visit, he was soon filled in on its so far limited success. “In 1986, I visited Adelaide as a member of the Himeji City Sister City delegation to attend an event marking the 150th Anniversary of Adelaide, South Australia,” Kumada tells The Adelaide Review via email. The garden’s saviour was a landscape designer named Yoshitaka Kumada. “No one seems to maintain it with that meticulous attention to detail that has been the reason why the great gardens of Japan have lasted centuries,” Ward wrote in a January 1987 edition of The Adelaide Review. One such critic was journalist Peter Ward, who complained in these very pages that the first garden was a “quite ignorant pastiche” and “aesthetic disaster”. As historian Patricia Sumerling notes in The Adelaide Park Lands: A Social History, the dozens of fish sent as a gift from the mayor of Himeji were picked off by local birdlife soon after their introduction – a troubling omen as to whether the project would sink or swim. The bare cyclone fencing that ringed the garden when it first opened in 1985 earned it the sobriquet ‘Cowra’, an unkind reference to the New South Wales town that hosted a POW camp for captured Japanese soldiers. In attempting to strike a balance between an authentic Japanese garden and something palatable to local residents, however, the garden’s first iteration missed the mark. In 1982 a new Sister City relationship was struck with the south-central Japanese city of Himeji, to be commemorated with the creation of a city garden – a slice of Japan in Adelaide.Īfter settling on its current South Park Lands site, the City of Adelaide’s landscaping department sought to consult widely with the Japanese community in designing the garden. The high-flying optimism of the 1980s saw the South Australian government boldly look outwards, fostering new economic and cultural ties with cities around the world.
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