Macquarie Park

Macquarie Park is a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia.

Macquarie Park is a suburb of Sydney, New South Wales, Australia. Macquarie Park is part of the Northern Sydney region and is located 13 kilometres north-west of the Sydney central business district in the local government area of the City of Ryde.Macquarie Park was part of the suburb of North Ryde until it was gazetted as a suburb in its own right on 5 February 1999, and many businesses still use North Ryde as the address. Both suburbs share the 2113 postcode but Macquarie University, which is located at the northern part of the suburb, has its own postcode of 2109.

The whole area between the Parramatta and Lane Cove Rivers was originally known by its Aboriginal name Wallumatta. Contact with the first white settlement's bridgehead into Australia quickly devastated much of the population through epidemics of smallpox and other diseases. Their descendants live on, though their language, social system, way of life and traditions are mostly lost. The Aboriginal name survives in a local reserve, the Wallumatta Nature Reserve, located at the corner of Twin and Cressy roads, North Ryde. Very few remnants of Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest still exist. The most substantial undisturbed area is the Wallumatta Nature Reserve in North Ryde, which is owned and managed by the National Parks and Wildlife Service. This small and critically endangered reserve, also known as the Macquarie Hospital Bushland, is one of the last remnants of the remaining 0.5% (as at 2007) of original and endangered turpentine-ironbark forests on Wianamatta shale soil in Sydney. See Sydney Turpentine-Ironbark Forest.

Macquarie Park is named for Governor Lachlan Macquarie (1762–1824), a British military officer and colonial administrator who served as the Governor of New South Wales from 1810 to 1821. The area that is now Macquarie Park was part of the suburb of North Ryde from the late 19th century. The area was once filled with market gardens, poultry farms and vast tracts of bushland, with many beautiful picnic spots and waterfalls.

The mid-1960s saw the establishment of Macquarie University and the 'Macquarie Park Employment Area' which saw the rezoning of 'Green Belt' bushland to allow for industrial activities. The initial concept for Macquarie Park was based on the idea of a similar hi-tech industrial area surrounding Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, the goal being to provide for the interaction between industries and the university.During the 1970s, companies such as Amalgamated Wireless Australasia Limited, Beiersdorf, Racal and Universal Press located their corporate headquarters in the area. Macquarie Park has since gained a reputation of being a leading high-tech industrial area in Australia. It attracts many local and international companies from high-tech fields including electronic, scientific, computing, medical, communication, pharmaceutical and business supply.

Like the rest of the Sydney basin, Macquarie Park has a humid sub-tropical climate with warm to hot summers and cool, damp winters. The record low of -3.5 °C (26 °F) was recorded on 28 July 1986. The record maximum temperature was recorded more recently, on 21 December 1994 when the temperature reached 43.1 °C (110 °F).