Pick your fights

I’m in North Fitzroy on a cold Saturday morning. My companion is hunting for organic this and free-range that, and I’m tucked into a little nook outside Wild Things, browsing through the noticeboard. Yoga classes, baby sitters, life coaching. Yup, I’m in North Fitzroy. Here’s a post-partum doula to lend a helping hand as you bond with your new-born and hold down your job and squeeze in the singing lessons. And there, right at the top –

PIEDIMONTES

have ignored your concerns about height

IT’S STILL TOO BIG!

Seven stories sure looks a lot bigger than two, but when a city goes from 5 to 9 million in 30 years, expect a lot more of this. And when a planet puts more heat into its climate systems, expect disruption to regular business. Things we’ve take for granted will require a rethink. 

But pick your fights. Last week, I was invited to facilitate discussion between residents in Lancefield. They’re concerned about the way their town is developing. Recent Development Planning Overlays (DPOs) from the Shire are red flags, they said. Higher density isn’t in the right place. Community submissions on a draft DPO made no difference. Unlike Riddells, there isn’t a Structure Plan for the town, but the Shire’s Settlement Strategy allows for growth from under 2,000 to 6,000 by 2030.

We sat there and talked over it, and around it, and over it again, until we settled on this: if the Shire isn’t doing planning for Lancefield’s future, then those who care about the town had better get started. Where should higher density go? Where should facilities for 6,000 people be placed? How will people move around, by car, bike and on foot?

Influencing planning decisions requires sustained effort. ‘Power never concedes anything without a demand. It never did and it never will.’ Frederic Douglass nailed that in 1857.[1] Resistance to business-as-usual is needed, but marching down Main Road with placards is just part of what’s needed. Fighting only suits some people. If you want to make a contribution, get serious:

Pick the issue that’s close to your heart. Be ready to make time in your already busy life to run with it. Make sure it’s something where you can get out of your depth and enjoy it. Be ready to learn.

Find a crew. You will need companions. Be ready to work with interesting, passionate people who will change your life. Go looking for like-minded people, and invite them to join you. Expect to learn a lot about yourself and those you work with.

Choose what you do. What’s your talent and expertise? What do you want to do that you haven’t ever done before? This issue is going to move into your life, so welcome it and make it an adventure.

Let’s say your passion is connectivity – a town where it’s easy to get around by car, on foot, by bicycle, on a scooter, pushing a pram. There’s the expertise needed, but there’s also organising, education, publicity and advocacy. 

If you’re a fighter by nature, then you’re the right person for advocacy. But that might not be you. 

How will people absorb the technical detail, talk, meet others and encounter their differing views around that issue. That’s education. 

How do you get that issue out to more people, grab their interest, address their reservations? That’s publicity. 

Who’s going to set the timelines, arrange the venues, get the flyers printed, make sure the invited speaker is well briefed? That’s organising.

This about the world we’re creating, but it’s your life too. Make it work for you.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare. For environmental questions on the Amess Road development, see                             

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[1] The full quote: ‘Power never concedes anything without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.’

But wait there's more!

The trail bikes are busy in Barrm Birrm, and the early wattles are coming into flower. The owners of private land on the western reach of Barrm Birrm, that stretches north of Royal Parade, want a deal to give land into the public estate in return for permission to build on just part of their acreage. Perhaps ‘Government’ will pick up the tab to buy the lots in the Shone and Schultz land. Perhaps.

Who will then throw a fence around the new reserve and put in the signage, mend the fences the bikers and 4WDers snip through and the replace the signs they deface, until a grudging peace is won? Who wants this battle, when there are so many others at hand? Who will support the slow rehabilitation of the fairly degraded land in the western reach, and keep up the work on woody weeds in the eastern slopes?

And here we are with the whole township invited to consider Sector Advantage’s proposal for 1290 lots on Amess Road, a prelude to the regulatory hurdles. 1290 lots pushed into a muddy landscape of trucks coming and going, then tradies and houses popping up and slowly, and finally the arrival of our new town residents, who at 2.5 people per residence will grow us close to double the current township, their kids riding their bikes to the primary school and their large vehicles gathering in Station Street on Friday afternoon for cartons of beer and bags of chips and sundries for dinner.

By the time you read this missive, we will have turned all these imponderables over at Riddells Creek Landcare’s AGM, early August, to gather together the likely impacts of the new development, and work out a few good questions. Perhaps we will find other brave Davids, with our slingshots and carefully chosen stones, ready to test Goliath.

At RCL, we’re curious to see how much attention Sector Advantage has paid to the landscape in which its 1290 residences will reside. Will Sandy Creek, which becomes Dry Creek as it trickles under the Kilmore Road, and that creek further north on the other side of the Dromkeen hill, become dense green incursions into suburbia, wilder places? How will water move across the estate? Walkways, common space that connects people – how welcoming with that be, to humans and to native birdlife? Will this be a precinct of exotic trees co-opted by gangs of Indian Mynahs, their raw persistent shouts, and nasty narrow streets jammed in to accommodate cookie-cutter houses? We will soon know all.

My own inclination is to start thinking how to make the heart of Riddell a place where it’s safe to walk with a pram, or to ride a bike or drive a car. How will we all get to the railway station without skittling pedestrians? Where will we stand in the sun talking to someone you haven’t seen in a while. How do we make a convivial place, for 2,500 more people. With a creek running through it.

But wait, there’s more! The environment groups of Riddell will have signed an agreement with Western Water, to jointly organise discussion about how to expand the capacity of the sewerage treatment works. Expand capacity, that is, while keeping Jacksons Creek and our little bit of the Maribyrnong catchment in rude good health. Riddells Creek Landcare won’t do the planning, that’s Western Water’s end of things, but our job will be to ask good questions, look at the data, assess the risks. And up discussion as a town to look at the options, weigh them up, and reach a considered point of view. We’re a species that tends to assume the environment can mop it all up, Can we deal with our waste without imposing too much on the environment?

As we start to wonder if the warm will even come back, it looks like September will a time for talking and thinking about the place we live. Here’s to wise decisions, and dodging the hype, and not falling into despair. 

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare

The uses of old people

Faced with the ageing body, which demands so much more maintenance as the years accumulate, a kind of loving patience develops towards what used to work but now can’t be taken for granted. 

It’s a short step to know that it’s the same with the country we live in: maintenance is required. Care. Things deteriorate unless you look after them. You can’t just throw away a landscape and buy a new one. You’re in it, it’s big and slow and the work of looking after it is constant. If you don’t put in the time and effort, you will suffer the consequences. If you do make the effort, then life is better.

When Landcare committees bemoan the absence of younger people in their ranks, I think they ought to value the sensibilities that only mature with age, and make this part of their offer to young people. 

Visit your local Landcare committee, and you’ll see a lot of grey hair. Believe it or not, these old folk were rebels in their time. They took up landcare in their twenties and thirties, battling the scepticism of their peers, and they changed the country, so that now we’re used to seeing creeks shaded with trees and paddocks with shelterbelts. They changed expectations too, so that looking after the natural systems of a property and its wider landscape is now the norm, not the exception.

But the rebels are headed for their seventies, they’re tired and they feel like a break. Where are the young people? Where is the raw energy and smarts of those just breaking into agriculture? What about the kids asking for climate action? Why don’t they get on a train and learn what it takes to look after a river? That youthful energy is one pole, but the other is the gravity of older people; oh alright – old people! They appreciate the need for constant care, but what else do they bring?

Old people know you can be wrong. We all make mistakes, yes, that’s an antidote to missteps that come with any serious purpose. But older people know that you can be head down a wrong track for many years and not know it, in a job, in a relationship, or with a grand plan, and then the trail peters out. Or you can arrive and find this is not what you wanted. The disappointment leads some to retreat from the world, to play it safe. For others, being wrong pushes them to look harder at their enthusiasms and to question what they take for granted. Older people are more sceptical and hard-nosed, and carry their enthusiasms more lightly. 

Old people know action leads to understanding. Landscapes are complicated. Having done a lot to look after properties and places, having been through the mill more than once, older people are wary of simple solutions. They are wary too of trying to know everything before starting. You don’t know what you don’t know until you get started; only then do you discover what will turn an idea into reality. Not knowing is not easy to bear, but older people have learnt to live with this. 

Old people know change takes time. They might wish things would happen faster, but older people know that changing people’s attitudes and behaviour takes a long time, just like changing landscapes. So find satisfaction with each step along the path, not just with the elusive end result. Things are exciting at the start, but when that wears off, there’s still work to be done. Older people remind themselves of what’s important, and keep going. 

Older people are grumpy, cantankerous and hard to please. Let’s celebrate their knowledge as part of learning how to living responsibly in this country.

Ross Colliver, Riddells Creek Landcare