Wanna dance with somebody

4 March 2021

The crowd is bouncing up and down, arms waving, singing along. The band can’t quite believe they’re playing live in front of a crowd, and we can’t believe it either. 

It’s delicious being up and out after so many months of Covid, exhilarating, like when you’ve been really sick and then one day, you feel well. We’re being normal. We’re dancing!

Maldon gets its boogie on!

 

I’m in the main street of Maldon, set out with tables and chairs, for the annual Maldon street dinner. Around 600 people have worked their way through the picnic boxes and run the bar dry, and now ‘The Best 80s Band’ is cutting loose. I didn’t know I knew these songs, but my body does. We’re deep into Whitney Houston, 1987: ‘I want to dance with somebody, wanna feel the heat with somebody, ooo ooooo, wanna dance with somebody.'

So here’s the thing—the town organises this night themselves. They organise the tables and chairs, and the liquor licence, the picnic boxes, and the covid safe check in. They talk to the local constabulary, but they don’t ask the Shire for permission. They just take over the street, and about a third of the town’s population show up.

Nice work Maldon! 

We have our Farmers Market, and the Lions playground, but I did wonder whether we’re too cautious and suburban to take possession of our own town.

Earlier that same Saturday, I was standing in the Main Drain, Murnong Creek, the concrete culvert between the Mechanics Institute and the playground. We were on a Saturday walk around the town thinking about traffic and the centre of Riddell, and we finished our walk here, in the Creek.

L to R: Narelle McGellin, her daughter, Jenny Ground, Julie Macdonald

It was quiet down there in the creek. You can’t see cars driving past, in fact, it’s the only place in the centre of Riddell where you can’t see cars. And it suddenly struck me: how amazing would this be as a place to hang out? There we are standing with Narelle, who has made the Lions playground happen because she thought it was needed, and it would be a cool thing to do.

What if the back end of the Mechanics Institute opened onto the creek, and you could sit in the northern sun? How much work would it take to put a few levels into the slope, with paths back into the pedestrian network? Planting that suited the creek. A place to dance on a summer night.

Moonee Ponds creek is being redesigned for flood control and biodiversity and recreational space. Bendigo Creek is opening to the city, not being kept shut away from it. Perth is turning drains and stormwater retention basins into wetlands and parks.

Why not our creek? 

Ross Colliver
Riddells Creek Landcare

 

 

Living Large

I’m driving home on one of those glorious summer mornings that start out cool and misty, then by mid-morning, clear away to radiant sunshine. I’ve been for a swim in Gisborne, and returned the back way, past Barringo Creek and down Gap Road and Sandy Creek. 

There’s Robert and Margaret up ahead, out walking, and I pull up. They came down for dinner earlier in the week, and it is good to see them again. We exchange small talk, and it’s good to stop in the middle of the morning routine, at the side of a dirt road, with the sun streaming down through the trees, catching up with warm-hearted people.

Living large, I’d call it, with people who know that care itself is important—that our social world isn’t a given, but is made anew each day. 

When I get home, a friend staying with us has a blog post from Nora Bateson, daughter of Gregory Bateson, an anthropologist and systems thinker from the middle of the 20thC. We read the piece out loud, on the veranda.

“The work of the coming decades is not the work of manufacturing, of software development, or of retail seduction, it is the work of caring. Caring for each other and the biosphere. In that care there is the hope of finding new ways of making sense of our own vitality.  The ‘my’ in my health is not mine; rather it is a consequence of my microbiome, my family, my community, and the biosphere being cared for.”

How do we conduct ourselves at this moment, when so much is at risk and so much in need of radical change? Bateson’s solution is to stay deep in the difficulty we’re in, and turn to those with whom we live, to learn our way through to more viable systems. “Business as usual is a swift endgame,” says Bateson.

Let’s take sewerage for instance. Western Water’s plant east of Riddell needs more capacity. You’ll catch it flashing past as you head to Melbourne on the train, but for most of us, it’s ‘out of sight, out of mind’. But it is kind of our problem–more houses, more people, more poo, more grey water. There aren’t agricultural businesses near Riddell to use the treated water, and land for dispersing the flow is very expensive, so, heave ho, it’s into Jacksons Creek. That means more nutrient into the system, and that requires a licence from the Environment Protection Authority.

Western Water are looking at the options. We know that fencing and revegetating along creeks up-stream can improve water quality and quantity, and this might offset a higher nutrient load from the treatment works. But it’s a complicated equation. At Riddells Creek Landcare, we’re asking Western Water to work with us to create a learning program on the science, economics and best practices involved.

Sewerage and healthy creeks—how to put the two together? We want to give an informed opinion when the options come through, and be part of generating the options. Drop a note to info@riddellscreeklandcare.org.au and I’ll put you on a mailing list if you want to keep track of this project. Expect to learn a lot. Expect close conversations with other people in and around Riddell who live large, and who care what happens here.

How South Gisborne Drain became Bungil Creek

We gather in light rain in a cleft of open ground between two creeks and a road, here in one of the growing edges of Gisborne. The rain is welcome. It gleams on the roofs of the new estates, trickles its way to downpipes and disappears, but the drains lead here to this confluence of creeks.

Amanda Gauci, Helen Radnedge and David Galloway at the renaming

We're celebrating the renaming of the South Gisborne Drain. It is now Bunjil Creek, a name chosen by the Wurundjeri Council. It’s on the Victorian Register of Geographic Names. Bunjil as in Bunjil the edge-tailed eagle, the ancestor, who circles high above Mount Gisborne, where this creek begins.

Search for Fersfield Road and Aitken Streets on Google Maps, and east of that junction you'll see a dotted blue line that disappears, then reappears a little north as 'South Gisborne Drain'. Then it disappears again. Where has it gone? It’s a creek, so it going downhill, north towards Jackson's Creek. When you drive from Riddell to Gisborne on the Kilmore Road, and come into Gisborne town past the bowling club, right onto Melbourne Road – there it is again Bunjil Creek, safely housed in a broad bluestone culvert that sends water under the road to Jacksons Creek. A forgotten creek, a hidden creek.

When I was a kid in North Box Hill, before the suburbs finally settled in, we played in creeks like this. We dammed them and built bridges and got covered in mud and burrowed our way inside groves of gorse and broom to secret hideaways. One big adventure was this: to walk underground through a big concrete culvert, a thin flow of brown water between your legs as you rocked side to side, and come out 20 or 50 metres later at the edge of a road or creek, blinking in the sunlight.

Creeks and open drains gave way to bitumen and underground drains. That's brought safety to the suburbs, and less mud, but we lost our creeks. They are still there, underground, but not the creek as a living thing. All that rushing, muddy, sweaty creekness disappears, the creek swollen in winter, dangerous, and in summer, a thin stream and the sound of crickets. We lose the danger and forbidden edges. It’s been no contest of course. Drains deliver efficiency in managing water, and also a fair quantum of land. New land that can be sold. New land that is appropriated by the quick and opportunistic.

So to recapture a creek in the middle of urban expansion anywhere in metropolitan Melbourne is a major achievement. After the renaming ceremony, Melbourne Water and Council staff headed into the rest of their working day and a few community people repaired to a local cafe to dry off and rest a little longer in the moment. Of course, it's not 'a moment'. The renaming has been two and a half years of patient work, pulling to light what was hidden in plans and Council minutes and agency files. Time spent not taking things for granted, asking difficult questions.

Some of the Gisborne gang: Jackson O'Neill, Helen Radnedge and Amanda Gauci

It's always bemused me that Landcare is promoted through photos of hillsides covered with those plastic plant guards, when the hard work is the hours at night spent reading plans closely, untangling who is responsible, writing letters and funding applications, insisting that what was promised in the plan or strategy is delivered, here, right here, in the middle of this messy contest between private and public interests. 

Caring for where you live means wrestling with cumbersome bureaucracies and entrenched perceptions and values within local communities. We can tinker at the edges, but until we challenge the dominance of private interests and their appropriation of the commons, we're not going to get far. 

I think of Frederick Douglass: 'Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.' Social reformer, abolitionist and orator, Douglass escaped from slavery in Maryland to become a national leader of the abolitionist movement. 

Let's put that quote in context. They come from an address in New York in 1857 commemorating the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. 

 

'Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.'

His words reach across the years to our sleepy hollows here in Australia. It seems a bit much to cast matters of creeks and town planning in the same light as the slavery of human beings. Here we are with every freedom, coddled inside creature comforts and community consultation. 

Nonetheless, healthy creeks and livable towns require citizens who don't take things for granted, who notice what's happening around them and speak up, people who insist that promises in plans be acted on. Private interests consume the common good, and must be challenged. 'Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.'

So here’s cheers to the good folk at Gisborne! You’ve got us thinking about our own drain here in Riddells Creek!

The Riddell Main Drain, outside the Bakery

The Main Drain heading to Station St and eventually Riddells Creek

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare