Transformed wetland spaces such as the suburban site of Lake Monger (situated in the Town of Cambridge and bordering City of Vincent, Perth, WA) challenge narratives of sustainability because their histories of urban development and human intervention undermine or defy conceptions of nature, and “natural states,” as distinct from people and culture. The site’s history of cultural significance and human intervention complicates the question of sustainability, centering it at a point of tension between conflicting narratives, agendas and cultural trends. For sustainability efforts to succeed for sites which, like Lake Monger, are “natural” environments thoroughly enmeshed in and transformed by a social broader social environment, it becomes necessary to ask questions about the site’s narrative sustainability. That is to say: what practices do we use to tell stories about these sites? What sort of possible futures do these stories suggest or preclude? Which of these entailed narratives of futurity align with sustainability goals? For a site to be sustainable, we must first be able to imagine, collectively, that site’s continued sustainment; such acts of collective imagination are played out in narrative space. This presentation is part of a broader research project that explores place-based creative writing practices and narratives of futurity in suburban ecological spaces. Here, theoretical frameworks derived from of narratology—the study of narrative structure—and literary theory are applied to scientific and historical literature describing Lake Monger and wetland areas of the Swan Coastal Plain at large. The aim of this analysis is to clarify the narrative component of “sustainability” in places that are fundamentally tied up with human communities and stories. Narratology and literature comparison are used to differentiate and navigate the conflicting conceptualisations of spaces that are described, and potentially overdetermined, by diverse sets of human agendas and narratives. Understanding sustainability and transformation as enacted in narrative space can contribute to the formulation of sustainability practices that are sensitive to the forces of cultural memory, and—it is hoped—produce narratives of futurity that are able to realise both continuity and resilience in threatened wetland spaces.