On Monday 7 January 2008 I placed an article about about the Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Groves on Wikipedia - the so-called open-source encyclopedia, and guess what??

On Tuesday 8 January 2008 the article was deleted. I had already made a link from the web site to the Wikipedia article, but will now remove it and make the link to my blog instead.

I find this sort of editing or censorship quite pathetic! Instead of contacting me and asking for various bits of information relating to the Groves in question, they just decide that the article does not have verification from other sources so can't be corroborated, whereas they had the web site of the Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Groves - SPAIDS -  and the Council under whose auspices the project was developed.

Here is the article:

SYDNEY PARK AIDS MEMORIAL GROVES – SPAIDS

Background history and development                                                          7 January 2008

The Brickworks at the bottom of  King Street Newtown in Sydney’s inner west ceased being a brickworks somewhere around the middle of the 1980s.

The site then became a garbage dump and became rather polluted with all the waste deposited there.

Ownership of the site had changed from private to public and by 1990 the area was under the control of South Sydney City Council. Council started cleaning up the site and ridding it of pollution and soon afterwards started grading and laying out the site for a large park to be called Sydney Park.

In the initial stages Council, which had its own nursery established on the site, planted trees to demarcate different parts of the Park. By 1992 Council was inviting community groups to plant trees in the Park to help it to become established.

At around this period, when many young people were dying from the AIDS epidemic, some members of the gay community, who had become carers for people with AIDS, approached South Sydney City Council with the request that they be considered as a community group in order to plant trees to commemorate people who had died of AIDS.

Similar groups had established memorial groves overseas and in Australia, and it was hoped that Council would be sympathetic to the request.

After about 18 months of negotiation, Council agreed to this community group being permitted to plant trees for commemoration purposes, and it was supposed that this would end up being a one-off event. The first planting by the AIDS Memorial Groves group took place on 15 May 1994. Council decided, in order to help establish the Park, to have three plantings a year and was inviting  assistance from community groups.

By 1996 the AIDS Memorial Groves group had planted on 8 occasions and found a name for the Groves – SPAIDS – Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Groves. Plantings continued to take place three times a year under the auspices of South Sydney City Council until that council was merged with Sydney City Council who continued with the establishment of the Park and community plantings.

SPAIDS has continued to be part of the Park and in 2001, while still under the auspices of South Sydney City Council, a Reflection Area with a permanent stone sculpture and circular surround was built by Council as part of the development of the Park.

The Park was beginning to show signs of being fully laid out with trees grown to full height by about 2002, and soon afterwards it was decided to have only one community planting a year and that to take place on National Tree Day which is usually the last Sunday in July.

By the end of 2007 about 8,000 trees had been planted, and 1,200 names recorded of those who have died of AIDS. This figure represents about 20 per cent of AIDS recorded deaths in Australia.

For web site, contact details and further information, see http://www.zipworld.com.au/~josken

Submitted for SPAIDS by Mannie De Saxe, Sydney Park AIDS Memorial Groves Founder and Co-coordinator.