Today visitors to Perth's Hyde Park, named for its London counterpart, find a lush English-style garden with two lakes surrounded by pathways, green lawn, and avenues of London plane trees.
But 150 years ago the area was known as Third Swamp, home to a tent city and residents who regularly hunted the local birdlife for food.
Damien Hassan, senior archivist at the State Records Office, said that prior to British colonisation the wetland was known by the Whadjuk Noongar people as Boodjamooling, and formed part of a series of wetlands on what is now Perth.
"In fact, a lot of Perth is built on these natural lake formations," Mr Hassan told ABC Radio Perth's Christine Layton.
"[Boodjamooling] is referenced on some of the historical maps but for many years in the 1800s it was known as Third Swamp.
"Many of them were drained by the Royal Engineers in the 1800s and we're probably quite lucky that Hyde Park remained a reserve and the lake wasn't drained."
Throughout the 1800s, settlers camped around the lake and in 1873 it was officially declared 'Third Swamp Reserve'.
Camping at the reserve reached a peak in the 1890s, when the gold rushes brought thousands of people west and put immense pressure on the city's limited accommodation.
"It wasn't just people from the east coast who were camping, it seems Perth people were being squeezed out of accommodation, so there are reports of even families having to camp at Hyde Park in the 1890s," Mr Hassan said.
"It reached such a point that the government realised it was an issue and passed a bylaw that regulated using public reserves for camps.
There is also evidence that campers were not just making their home in the park, but also eating the local birdlife as well.
"The report from 1897 is that there weren't many birds around in Hyde Park at that time because they'd been hunted for food."
By 1897, people in neighbouring streets in Mount Lawley had begun to complain about the campsite and the reserve was gazetted as Hyde Park and plans were made to turn it into a public garden.
Mr Hassan said the plans were spurred on by the attraction of the area for various sports groups.
"It seems like that was the impetus for Hyde Park becoming Hyde Park, the League of WA Wheelmen sending a deputation to the Undersecretary of Lands to turn the area into a cycling velodrome," he said.
"That gets refused and then they decide in 1897 to turn it into a public garden.
"Even in the 1900s, there are requests to use it as a football field and tennis courts. In 1912 there was a very ambitious plan to install huge public swimming baths, which would have cost more than $1 million today.
In 1899, a grand fountain was installed in the park — big enough to stock fish that children would be caught fishing.
Unfortunately, by 1920, the regular vandalism of the fountain had become so bad that the fountain was removed — it's not known what became of it afterwards.
In 1914, earthworks began to build a causeway across the lake, allowing vehicles to cross, but again, the public intervened.
"There was huge public opposition, so as soon as they built it, they decided not to use it for vehicles and turned it into pedestrian access and lined it with trees," Mr Hassan said.
Looking through the City of Perth and state government files on the park, Mr Hassan said what stood out was the sheer volume of complaints that flowed in over the use of the park.
There were complaints about the use of the toilets, noise, children fishing in the fountain, and the shooting of ducks in the park.
"There were complaints in 1916 about George Meekin's cow from Charles Street straying on to Hyde Park at night and it had a bell that would wake up the neighbours," he said.
The park was also a popular spot for religious preachers.
"Sometimes you will have people living in the area complaining about the noise these people made delivering their fire and brimstone.
"Sometimes they are complaining about each other, saying a person had taken their spot for preaching.
New growth in recent decades
While the park now looks like it has been transplanted from Victorian London, its growth is more recent.
"We think of it as such a lush, well-treed park with lots of trees in the area but even in the 1950s looking at aerial photos, the trees are very immature. A lot of the trees that you know there today were only planted in the past few decades."
In 1968 the park took on a new life with the creation of the Hyde Park Festival, which became huge in the 1970s.
"There were so many arts and crafts activities back then and it also had a very strong multicultural focus, which remains a big feature of the Hyde Park Festival to this day."
