This photo was taken in 1997 from an aircraft flying over Arncliffe. Cooks River, of which Wolli Creek is a tributary, can be seen running across the top right-hand corner of the photo and the East Hills rail line runs across the bottom.

Wolli Creek's floodplain can be seen clearly. It features relic reedlands of southern reed Phragmites australis (left). Reedlands once covered huge areas on either side of the waterways entering Botany Bay. This is the habitat of the golden-headed cisticola Cisticola exilis (right), a bird rare in the Sydney region.

Nannygoat Hill is covered by native plants forming a low scrub or 'climax heath'. Because water drains off it on all sides, it has not been affected by rainwater runoff enriched by dog faeces, lawn fertilizer and detergent. The phosphorous content of the soil on the hill has therefore not increased, so introduced weeds have not become firmly established, while native plants, which have evolved to handle low nutrient soils, continue to thrive.

Stage 1 of the Department of Main Road's plans for the F5 freeway (dating from the late 1940s) would have seen a four lane freeway through the centre of this greenspace, to be followed in stage 2 by four more lanes!