Something to trade

27 Sunday May 2018

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Although Sydney was initially established as a punishment nearly as final as hanging, or possibly more simply just to get convicts out of England – and maybe to rehabilitate them at the same time, but maybe no-one cared that much – it very swiftly became a convenient stopping point for traders, and a market for sale of goods as well.

Cook’s voyages in 1772-75 had revealed the abundance of sea life in the southern waters, and sealing and whaling had followed.

Sealers were after oil and skins; whalers wanted the oil that was used for lighting: “he [the whale] must die the death and be murdered, in order to light the gay bridals and other merry-makings of men, and also to illuminate the solemn churches that preach unconditional inoffensiveness by all to all.”[i]A very large sperm whale “will yield the bulk of one hundred barrels of oil” or “ten tons of net weight”.[ii]The jawbone supplied “ivory teeth … that hard white whalebone with which the fishermen fashion all sorts of curious articles, including canes, umbrella-stocks, and handles to riding whips.”[iii]Also prized was ambergris, “an essence found in the inglorious bowels of a sick whale”, a substance that was “soft, waxy, and so highly fragrant and spicy, that it is largely used in perfumery, in pastiles, precious candles, hair-powders, and pomatum.”[iv]

Sealing and whaling ships regularly stopped along the coast for repairs and to boil down their catches. Manning Clarke records that five whaling ships brought convicts in 1791 on their way to the whaling grounds, with the first American whaler arriving in 1802.[v]Hermann Melville reverses cause and effect:

That great America on the other side of the sphere, Australia, was given to the enlightened world by the whaleman. After its first blunder-born discovery by a Dutchman; all other ships long shunned those shores as pestiferously barbarous; but the whale-ship touched there. The whale-ship is the true mother of that now mighty colony. Moreover, in the infancy of the first Australian settlement, the emigrants were several times saved from starvation by the benevolent biscuit of the whale-ship luckily dropping an anchor in their waters.[vi]

The sealers and whalers were greedy and indiscriminate, killing in 50 years the bulk of seals and whales in the area. As Melville says, ‘They were bent on profitable cruises, the profit to be counted down in dollars from the mint.’[vii]

The hunt was extremely dangerous for the hunters as well as the prey: “For God’s sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man’s blood was spilled for it.”[viii]Not only the hunt – which was conducted by men in small boats flinging harpoons into whales when close enough – but the subsequent ‘boiling down’ of the blubber to make oil. Having secured the animal to the side of the boat and hoisted it high enough to be reached by the ‘spade-man’, the blubber is cut into chunks and brought on board. There it is minced and fed into the ‘try-pots’.

With huge pronged poles they pitched hissing masses of blubber into the scalding pots, or stirred up the fires beneath, till the snaky flames darted, curling, out of the doors to catch them by the feet. The smoke rolled away in sullen heaps. To every pitch of the ship there was a pitch of the boiling oil, which seemed all eagerness to leap into their faces.[ix]

The life of the sealer was equally fraught, with many sealing gangs dropped off on tiny wild islands for months, sometimes years at a time, to catch everything they could and then load it when their ship returned.[x]

For the tiny new colony of Sydney Cove, these sacrifices added up to one thing: something to trade.

 

[i]Moby Dick P391

[ii]Moby Dick p333

[iii]Moby Dick p362

[iv]Moby Dick p447

[v]Clark, CMH. A History of Australia. Vol 1. Melbourne University Press, 1979, p197. First published 1962.

[vi]Moby Dick p120

[vii]Moby Dick p202

[viii]Moby Dick p224

[ix]Moby Dick p463

[x]Hainsworth p144 ff.

From green forest to Green Valley

18 Friday May 2018

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When the white settlers had arrived at Warrane and renamed it ‘Sydney Cove’, they had brought with them deadly diseases. Within the first twelve months large numbers of the local people were dead, many from a disease that may have been smallpox. At the beginning of the 20thcentury, just over one hundred years later, the forest the white settlers had landed in was gone, the stream they had relied on for water was closed in, and they were facing deadly diseases themselves. Large areas of the city were cordoned off and quarantined in the first months of 1900 during an outbreak of bubonic plague. Parts of the city they had built were resumed and demolished.

The Sydney Corporation Amendment Act1900 empowered the City Council to resume land for purposes connected with streets and public places, but it was the 1905 amendment of that act which gave the council the power to resume land for slum clearance and public housing purposes. Between 1905 and 1917 the council made 83 resumptions, starting in Ultimo, then in Wexford Street, Haymarket, Camperdown and Chippendale. Surry Hills lost 75% of its housing stock between 1900 and the 1930s as the council cleared the area and rezoned it commercial and industrial.[i]A lot of property had already been resumed for the extension of the railway, including the Convent of the Good Samaritan (built on the site of the Carters’ Barracks), the Benevolent Asylum (built in 1821), and the Devonshire Street cemetery.

When Ruth Park and Darcy Niland went to live in Surry Hills in 1942, the area was still full of tiny, cramped houses with little planning for hygiene. Ruth Park turned the slum into the ground-breaking, award-winning trilogy, The Harp in the South. She and Niland described it in their joint autobiography, The Drums Go Bang!

The shrieks and screams of the Saturdee-arvo merrymakers filtered through the walls; someone was mercilessly beating a child two backyards away, and the indescribable smell of the slums, of stale food and a century of dirt, unwashed bodies, beer, and an unbearable contiguity of lives filled that little damp-stained room.[ii]

The government’s slum clearance program came under intense scrutiny after The Harp in the Southwon the 1946 Sydney Morning Heraldliterary competition, and in the 1950s the area Ruth Park had written about, bounded by Devonshire, Clisdell, Belvoir and Riley Streets, was demolished. There had been eight streets with up to 900 terrace houses in the area: they were replaced by the Northcott Estate towers, with 591 apartments, opened in December 1961. Ruth Park attended the opening. Queen Elizabeth II visited in 1963.

Few of the original inhabitants of the area were rehoused at Northcott[iii]. The rats, the ‘cramped and squalid streets’, the ‘dark congested hovels’[iv]might have been gone but so were the people with their ‘uncluttered, basic kindness’.[v]The people were scattered to the wider suburbs.

Some people were rehoused by the Housing Commission in the 1950s in new developments at Ryde, Villawood, Maroubra, Seven Hills, Ermington, Rydalmere and Dundas Valley. The first planned neighbourhood estate was at Orphan School Creek in Canley Vale, with between 200 and 300 detached and semi-detached houses.[vi]

In the early 1960s the Housing Commission widened its horizons and built its first new town. The Green Valley estate was built between 1961 and 1965 to house 25,000 people in 6000 new properties.[vii]It nearly doubled the population of nearby Liverpool. Its suburbs – Ashcroft, Busby, Cartwright, Heckenburg, Hinchinbrook, Miller and Sadleir – were named after early (white) luminaries of the district. Its street names were themed as well, with cattle in Busby (such as Frieisian, Devon, Aberdeen Streets) birds in Hinchinbrook (Emu, Robin, Egret Streets) and sheep in Miller (Merino, Shropshire and Leicester Streets).

The 1966 census showed that the people were predominantly of British origin – 98%, which was higher than the NSW figure of 96%. But their ages showed a population wildly at variance with the NSW average – 20.6% were aged under 5, compared to 9.5% in NSW. Only 40.1% were aged over 20, compared to 62.9% in NSW. It was a population thrown out to fend for itself, with few leaders and few resources.

 

[i]http://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/history/sydneystreets/Lost_Streets/Resumptions/map.html

[ii]Ruth Park and Darcy Niland, The Drums go Bang!, Angus & Robertson, 1956, p.106.

[iii]What have they done there? Two years at Northcott: An observation of a work in progress. Emily Mayo – In consultation with all partners. Big hART, December 2004.

[iv]Ruth Park and Darcy Niland, The Drums go Bang!, Angus & Robertson, 1956, p192.

[v]Ruth Park and Darcy Niland, The Drums go Bang!, Angus & Robertson, 1956, p151.

[vi]http://www.housing.nsw.gov.au/About+Us/History+of+Public+Housing+in+NSW/The+1950s.htmviewed 25 May 2010

[vii]http://www.housing.nsw.gov.au/About+Us/History+of+Public+Housing+in+NSW/The+1960s.htm

The city expands

12 Saturday May 2018

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Sydney continued to expand steadily in the 1830s. Traders and entrepeneurs were transforming it into a colony, rather than a penal settlement. In 1840 transportation to NSW would stop.

A ‘Plan of Sydney with Pyrmont, New South Wales: The Latter the Property of Edw. Macarthur Esquire, Divided into Allotments for Building. 1836’[1], shows that the creeks that were present just five years earlier are vanishing and Cockle Bay is contracting. Streets are dotted in over the cattle market grounds. There are three new wharves between Miller’s Point and Dawes Point. The area around Pyrmont Bay, as the name of the map suggests, is divided into 101 allotments.

There is still a small section marked ‘Cattle Markets’ near Campbell Street in 1843, and now there is a ‘Hay Market’ as well. Wharves are appearing in Pyrmont Bay. Ferry routes to Balmain and across the harbour are indicated, and the river route to Parramatta. Streets cross the lowlands of Woolloomooloo and the ridge above, called Darlinghurst. Wests Creek is marked, running down into Rushcutters Bay. Grose Farm is labelled out on the edge of the city, in the fork between Parramatta Road and City Road.

The Hay and Corn Market and the Cattle Market can still be seen in a map from 1854[2]. The edges of the harbour, from ‘Semi Circular Quay’ to Pyrmont, bristle with wharves for all that trade. ‘Semi Circular Quay’ itself is flat and wharfless. A wharf and jetties have appeared in Woolloomooloo Bay. There are Toll Bars on the major roads into and out of the city – ‘South Head Old Road’ (east of Dowling Street); ‘William Street east’ (at Rushcutters Bay), ‘Parramatta Street’ (just west of the turn-off to ‘The Glebe Road’). The ‘Terminus of the Sydney Railway’ is marked between Cleveland Street and Devonshire Street (although there would be no terminus buildings, and no trains, for another year), and the train line is marked as ‘Sydney and Goulburn Railway’ (recording the original motivation for a train line, proposed in 1848). A branch train line marked down the west side of Darling Harbour would also be completed and opened in 1855.

The next map in the book, from 1866[3], is a masterpiece of interconnectedness, with bridges across Darling Harbour, Blackwattle Bay, and linking Pyrmont and Glebe Island. There are roads and a subdivision on the north side of the harbour, called ‘St Leonards’.

Then the maps can no longer contain themselves within the city. The 1868 map stretches out to Tempe and Botany in the south, Canterbury and Ashfield in the west, Balgowlah to the north. Coogee, Waverley and Randwick show substantial development in the east.

When the first train line, from Sydney to Parramatta, opened in 1855, the spread of people out of the city accelerated. In 1851 9,684 people lived in suburbs; this figure increased to 28,233 by 1856. It took about another twenty years for the number of suburb-dwellers to exceed the number of city-dwellers. By 1891 there were more than twice as many people living in the suburbs – 275,631 – compared to the city – 107,652.[4]

[1]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p23.

[2]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p26-7.

[3]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p29.

[4]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p76

Brickfield Hill

06 Sunday May 2018

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The stretch of George Street, roughly from Hay Street to Bathurst St, known for many years as Brickfield Hill, was named for the brickworks that were developed almost as soon as the white settlers arrived. By 1790, the master brickmaker, “was tasked to make and burn ready for use 30,000 tiles and bricks per month. He had twenty-one hands to assist him, who performed everything; cut wood, dug clay, etc.” [i]

A book of early maps shows Sydney erupt and spread, always subdividing and gridding, hacking off new portions of land and covering them with lines. The ‘Brick Field’ is shown on the very first map in the book, sketched by Francis Fowkes in April 1788. It is way off on the southern outskirts of the settlement, past the Saw Pits and the two ‘Shingling Parties’. There is a little cluster of camps, buildings and gardens on each side of a tapering line of water simply labelled ‘Cove’, with the ships of the First Fleet hovering on wavy lines at its mouth.[ii]The little colony had to make everything with what was to hand, and the earliest huts were made of the “soft wood of the cabbage palm”[iii].

In 1802 a map by Charles Alexander Lesueur has the brickfields marked as “Village de Brick-field où se trouvent plusieurs fabriques de Tuiles, de Poteries, de Faïances, &c.”[iv][Village of Brickfield where there are many manufacturers of tiles, pottery, crockery etc]. The brickfield is on a sizeable creek that runs down towards Cockle Bay, branching near the head of the bay, presumably into mangroves. There are three windmills shown, two on top of the cliffs west of Sydney Cove, and one where the Conservatorium now stands. (Sydney was to have 19 windmills, built and destroyed between 1797 and 1878.[v]) This map also shows two gallows. Even in 1802 one is marked as ‘disused’ as the streets have encroached on its privacy – this one must have been near the corner of present-day Park and Castlereagh Streets. The position of the second I calculate to be somewhere in Hyde Park, maybe near the War Memorial.

In the 1822 map the town is nearing the brickfields. The old cemetery, on the corner of George and Druitt Streets, is full. There is a building labelled ‘Market House’ on the adjacent block, with easy access from the Cockle Bay wharf, where produce from farms at Parramatta and the Hawkesbury was unloaded.[vi]The city is reaching out – a new cemetery is marked way out past the brickfields, near the “Turnpike [toll] Road to Parramatta and the interior”[vii]and the road to South Head is clearly marked.

By 1831 the map shows the site of the brickfield as a cattle market, but the name is retained on a nearby section of George Street – ‘Brickfield Hill’ is written between Liverpool and Goulburn Streets.[viii]There is a Benevolent Asylum near the turnpike, a Police Office next to the Market Place, steam engines and wharves on Darling Harbour and wharves and dockyards on Sydney Cove.

The Picture of Sydney and Strangers’ Guide in NSW for 1839describes Brickfield Hill as having been ‘not only steep and difficult, but actually dangerous’. However, in 1837-8 the incline was flattened, making it ‘easy for all kinds of drays, wagons and other carriages.’

The Town Hall would be built on the site of the original cemetery. The Queen Victoria building (QVB) would be built on the site of the Market House. But that’s all in the future.

 

[i]1788, by Watkin Tench. Reprinted in Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration, Tim Flannery (ed.), Text Publishing, 2002, p152.

[ii]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p7.

[iii]R Burford, ‘Description of the Town of Sydney’ 1829 quoted in Graham Connah, ‘Of the hut I builded’: The Archaeology of Australia’s History, CUP 1988

[iv]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p15

[v]Fox, L. Old Sydney Windmills. Published by Len Fox, 1978.

[vi]Bridges, P. Foundations of Identity: Building Early Sydney 1788-1822. Hale & Iremonger, 1995, p146.

[vii]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p19

[viii]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p21

A tale of one city

26 Thursday Apr 2018

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Up until 1787 Warrane was an important food source for about 30 clans. In 1788, part of the area occupied by the Cadigal was suddenly called ‘Sydney Cove’ instead of Warrane. Suddenly more than a thousand people (accounts vary) had to be fed and housed and subdued in this area. By 1860 – only a lifespan of 72 years later – there were 95,789 people in Sydney, and it provided everything from grand houses to workers’ cottages to slums. The housing and population booms of the next two decades brought the population up to 224,939 in 1880, a figure which itself was nearly doubled by 1890 to 383,283 and ‘Sydney’ covered an area of more than ‘150 square miles’.[i]

‘Sydney’, as defined by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (the Sydney Statistical Division), spreads from the east coast to Blackheath and Mt Victoria in the west, Bargo in the south and the bottom of Lake Macquarie in the north.[ii]It covers an area of over 12,000 square kilometres and has a population of just over 5 million – nearly two-thirds of the population in 1.5% of the area of NSW.[iii]

Various schemes have tried to impose order on this expansion. The first governor, Governor Philip, devised a plan for the town, specifying the size of the allotments and streets, even protecting the environs of the Tank Stream by a band of 15 metres on either side that was not to be used for tree-cutting or cattle-grazing. When Philip left in 1792 his plans and orders lost their potency, setting the pattern for ideals with short lives.

Marjorie Barnard described Sydney in 1947 as a creation of profiteering and ostentation.

Macquarie’s was the last effort to plan Sydney. After him it just grew. It accumulated amenities and swelled to the idea of progress. Profiteering and ostentation left their marks indelible and heavy on the material fabric of the city. The well-to-do and worthy citizens – it was overwhelmingly their city – made no concessions to geography or climate. They built a city in the spirit of no surrender.[iv]

Mrs Charles Meredith, travelling with her husband in 1839, noted the ‘spirit of no surrender’, as well as the ‘ostentation’: “I never saw any native fish at a Sydney dinner-table – the preserved or cured cod and salmon from England being served instead, at a considerable expense, and, to my taste, it is not comparable with the cheap fresh fish, but being expensive, it has become ‘fashionable’, and that circumstance reconciles all things.”[v]

But Macquarie’s wasn’t the last to attempt to plan Sydney. After over a hundred years of private developers, a Royal Commission for the Improvement of Sydney and Its Suburbsin 1909 produced recommendations for improvements to roads, public transport, slums, children’s playgrounds and building regulations. Private individuals in the 1910s lobbied to improve life for the masses through improved public health, housing, transport and civic design. ‘City beautiful’ ideas and reforms in cities in Europe and America inspired developments around Australia, with soldier repatriation after WW1 becoming a major theme of town planning.

In 1946 a new body, theCumberland County Council, was set up.The 1948 Cumberland County Council planbecame state policy in 1951, but the push from land developers, keen to cash in on the attraction of suburban living and the new goals of consumerism, and the state government’s own Housing Commission, saw encroachments on the ‘green belts’. Cars and highways were favoured over public transport, suburbs over decentralisation.

Plans for Sydney have proliferated since: in 1968, Sydney Region Outline Plan, in 1988, Sydney into Its Third Century, in 1995,Cities for the 21stCentury, in 1997, A Framework for Growth and Change.[vi]In 2010 it was Investing in a Better Future, which had a certain hopeful ring about it, but in March 2018 the Dickensian-sounding A Metropolis of Three Citieswas launched. ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness …’

 

[i]Ashton, P & Waterson, D. Sydney takes shape: a history in maps. Hema Maps, 2000, p78

[ii]http://www.ausstats.abs.gov.au/ausstats/nrpmaps.nsf/NEW+GmapPages/national+regional+profile?opendocumentviewed 26/4/18

[iii]http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@.nsf/Lookup/1338.1Main+Features9Dec+2010

[iv]The Sydney Book. Written by Marjorie Barnard, drawings by Sydney Ure Smith. Ure Smith, 1947, p22.

[v]Mrs Charles Meredith, Notes and Sketches of New South Wales. First published by John Murray 1844. Facsimile edition Penguin Books 1973. P43.

[vi]The Australian metropolis: a planning history. S Hamnett and R Freestone (eds). Allen & Unwin, 2000.

Terra nullius

20 Friday Apr 2018

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A ferry ride on Sydney Harbour is always a little holiday, a period of delight, rocking gently on the waves while the glinting buildings, the swathes of bushland, the waves at the shore, the yachts and warships and tugs and cruisers pass by.

Today is no exception. The ferry chugs its way out of Circular Quay, past the exuberant flamboyance of the Opera House. I’ve seen it blue, and pink; covered in paisley patterns and butterflies; I’ve seen it with ‘No War’ gallantly painted on its sails, the red paint dripping. Today it is gleaming white.

The point on which it stands, Bennelong Point, was named for Bennelong, an Aboriginal man of the Wangal people captured by Governor Phillip in late 1789 in a desperate attempt to communicate with the Aborigines. The first Aboriginal man kidnapped for the same purpose, Arabanoo, had died of the smallpox in May 1789. A house was built for Bennelong on Bennelong Point; since then, it has been Fort Macquarie, and a tram shed.

Fort Denison comes into view on our right hand side and the woman behind us excitedly tells her little girl, ‘That’s Fort Denison. We can go there too. That was here when the convicts used to come to Australia. Before anyone was here.’ The myth of terra nullius, so convenient in the 19thcentury, rejected in the Australian High Court in 1992, lives on.

It’s not true that no-one was here before ‘the convicts used to come to Australia’.

[there were] Colbee … Bereewan, Bondel, Imeerawanyee, Deedora, Wolarawaree, or Baneelon, among the men; … Wereeweea, Gooreedeeana, Milba, or Matilba, among the women. Parramatta, Gweea, Cameera, Cadi, and Memel, are names of places.[i]

The Cadigal, the people whose land was immediately usurped by the colonists, was a clan of about 60 people. Jakelin Troy calls their language ‘the Sydney language’, and defines it as being spoken by a tribe that lived across an area from the coast to the Hawkesbury and Nepean Rivers to the north and west, and as far south as Appin[ii]. According to Troy there were at least two dialects of the Sydney Language spoken by the various clans within the tribe, and the name ‘Eora’ or ‘Iyora’ is now given to the people who lived on the coast, and their dialect[iii]. A number of the early colonists were interested to record this language, despite the difficulties on both sides in understanding particular sounds. Troy points out that only the officers of the First Fleet recorded the Sydney Language. A contact language, New South Wales pidgin, rapidly took its place. The Aboriginal people were much more linguistically adept than the British, picking up both English and the pidgin. David Collins (deputy judge-advocate in Sydney 1788-1796) wrote in April 1792 that the Aboriginals, “conversed with us in a mutilated and incorrect language formed entirely on our imperfect knowledge and improper application of their words.”[iv]

Jakelin Troy’s book, The Sydney Language, provides a 50 page wordlist, bringing to life the people who spoke the language. Their words for people and kin, body parts, weapons, implements and other made objects, plants and animals show the priorities that they had – three words for different types of baskets, four types of shields, ten types of spears.  They had five different ways of saying ‘stop’, from ‘wari wari’, meaning to stop something being done that you don’t like, to ‘mayalya’ meaning ‘a little stop’.  It’s when you read their words for tickle (‘gidi gidi’), shiver, embrace, afraid, pick teeth, laugh, sexual desire, breathe, snore, love … that you feel the connection.[v]

 

[i]Tench, W. 1788. First published 1789 and 1793. Reproduced in Flannery, T, Two Classic Tales of Australian Exploration. Text Publishing, 2002, p265.

[ii]Troy, J. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries project and AIATSIS, Canberra 1993 p8.

[iii]Troy, J. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries project and AIATSIS, Canberra 1993 p9.

[iv]Collins, 28 April 1792. Quoted in Jack Egan, Buried alive: Sydney 1788-92, Allen & Unwin 1999 p287.

[v]Troy, J. The Sydney Language. Produced with the assistance of the Australian Dictionaries project and AIATSIS, Canberra 1993 p33-84.

The farm

20 Friday Apr 2018

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In 2002 I bought a farm with two other people. Nine hundred acres of beauty. One failed friendship, one wedding and hundreds of phone calls later, we had permission from the local council to establish a community with eight houses. A further five years after that, on September 7, 2012, I sat at my desk, in my new house, for the first time. The farm project had started for me with a vision of a desk, with a large window and a large view outside. The vision hadn’t included the years of negotiation and discussion, of obstructive agencies and files that go ‘missing’. It hadn’t included the turmoil and heat of decision-making. But on September 7, 2012, at my desk, as I had imagined, there was an eagle high up in the sky, drifting on the air currents. The wind had been blowing, gusting all day but had finally calmed, and the eagle was gliding without being buffeted around. The trees were almost still, with the occasional shake a reminder of the day’s wildness.

Now that dream is over. Our share in the farm is sold, and someone else will be living in our house. They will see the bluewrens and the firetails. They will see frogs on the windows and snakes in the garden. They will hear wallabies at night, and watch the kookaburras ring the house, on gutters and fenceposts, at the right time of year. I hope they fill the birdbath with water, and let the swallows roost under the eaves.

A butcherbird in the city

14 Thursday Sep 2017

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14/9/17

At the entrance to the community garden I empty my compost bucket into the bin. Today I am not in a rush, and I stop and look around. They’ve been making changes in the garden and it’s more open. It’s easier to see the new raised garden bed with its flowering marigolds and purple crinkly kale. I walk along its length towards the shed, with three beehives on its roof. The bees are moving busily around the entrances, taking to the sky and disappearing. A movement in the old bath full of duckweed and branches lets me see one bee carefully balanced on the thick surface, drinking.

I am drawn deeper into the garden, drawn by mulched garden beds and climbing pea sprouts. A bay tree and a coffee bush, covered in berries, guard each side of the path. I go through them to the garden lots, each tended for better or worse. They form a narrow strip of optimism, their baby lettuces in rows, their tomatoes staked.

As I stand in silence, consumed by the sight of green leaves and brown soil, I hear a rustling. I track it to the back of an area newly overturned and composted, to a noise that becomes a pecking, a shaking of leaves. A small black head, still showing traces of baby grey-brown, bobs up and down, its neatly hooked beak worrying at a nugget of clumped soil. It extracts something – worm, beetle, sliver of decomposed meat – looks at me with satisfaction and gulps it down. It digs again, successfully, hops to one side and digs from a new direction, tossing aside rotted leaves to expose the soil and its morsels. Abruptly it looks at me again and flies off.

The song of the butcherbird is one of my favourites. I like to think that my compost was feeding that one.

Under the streetlight

30 Friday Jun 2017

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A cone of streetlight fell onto an autumn tree in a winter night, shining its leaves and giving them colour. Clusters of rounded leaves – orange, yellow, red, light green – hung like lanterns papered in torn tissue by Matisse. They formed garlands that swung in the breeze, each piece in place, but when the traffic lights changed from red to green, and a torrent of cars swept up the oil-dark road, each leaf flew freely and the lanterns were flotsam, swept to and fro, and the tree shook off its garlands to become one mass, shaking, shivering.

Not at the farm 2

08 Saturday Apr 2017

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We had some mint at the farm that, contrary to most expectations of mint, thrived in a very sunny, exposed spot that didn’t get a lot of water. It had taken a year to decide whether to live or die, but once it was established it thrived. Before we left the farm I picked a big bag of it, for tea and salads. It turned out to be a miracle bag, staying fresh for weeks. Even when some small pieces blackened, there were still other pieces that were bright green and fragrant. It was only when the mint was nearly finished that I thought that I could have kept it longer by letting it grow in water. So I found a few pieces that still had firm stalks, cut the bottoms off them and stuck them in a glass of water.

Like little shoots of green in spring that speak so loudly of promise and hope and rebirth, the mint stalks developed a fuzz that turned into tiny hairy roots that quickly extended into strings of root circling the inside of the glass. The leaf stem was shooting up too, growing long and lanky. New leaves sprouted, but they were light green and stunted. I put the glass in the tiny gap between the two layers of windows to let it catch the sun, but the water kept on evaporating. My mint needed a proper home.

When you want to grow something and you live in a flat, soil becomes a precious thing. I have found a community garden nearby, with community compost bins. Once or twice a week I go down there to empty our compost bucket, unable to let all that good proto-soil go into the garbage bin. I found a plastic pot on a throw-out pile in the street and took it down to the garden the next time I went with my compost. I wandered the garden, nostalgic for the time when I paid attention to each new leaf and shoot and bud, brushing against the clutch of unruly pumpkin vines, feeling the roughness of their leaves without needing to touch them. I walked under an arch of passionfruit, noted a rosella springing up, admired the size of kale leaves and a luxuriance of beans, hanging decoratively.

There was a mound of soil in a corner that looked like an emptied compost bin. I filled my scavenged plant pot and took it home, potted up the mint over the laundry tub, used an old vegetable tray (non-recyclable, so I’d intended to take it back to the shop) as a saucer, and put the mint back in a spot where it can catch the morning sun and dream of hills that caught the wind and called back to the cries of the black cockatoos.