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

 

 

The weedy season

20 January 2021

I'm down in my bit of Sandy Creek, doing what has to be done with the summer weeds.

I've been able to avoid it till January, because of the wet weather. With all that dampness, and coolness, the thistles are late to flower, and I've put it off and put it off, until .... oh bugger it, if I don't get those thistles before they seed, I'll lose the ground I've been gaining on them over the last few years.

So here I am with my mattock, to lift out the thistle roots with the narrow end, and secateurs and chicken feed bag to stash the thistle heads that are too far advanced to risk leaving them in the open air. The carcasses I stack to be hauled away to the burning pile. 

There's blackberry too, growing briskly after all that rain, gorse of course, re-sprouting, and something I haven't noticed before that looks decidedly non-native, a kissing cousin I'm sure to the water-loving weed I've been targeting around the house this summer. Some serious attention from the mattock and I've cleaned out two clumps.

There are fewer weeds than last year, and fewer than five years ago. Dean Platt, the ecologist who first inspected my place and put me into the Melbourne Water Stream Frontage program, said at the time: 

"We just have to tip the balance in favour of the natives, and they will take over the territory."

The first three years of spaying changed a creek covered in blackberry to this sunlight gully of bracken and the sweet bursaria in bloom now on the northern side of the creek. 

All the creek asks of me now is this annual sweep to discourage the bad guys. 

Then it stays here, from summer into winter and rolling back to summer, living out its life. Any season and any time of the day, I can walk down to another world.

Ross Colliver
Riddells Creek Landcare