A few months ago I went to see a doctor in Brunswick. It was a queer friendly place, and I had chosen it because I had been passing some blood, and thought it was probably caused by one or two little-too-rough nights with my boyfriend and his silicon strap-on. After having a nicely lubed finger stuck up my butt by a very friendly doctor, it turned out there was nothing sexy about it at all. It was piles, most likely caused by too much sitting on my arse during the last five years of a soul sucking corporate job.
How this bloody episode came to pass is a story of optimism and escape, of hit and run as it were. I started a job at a private archaeological consultancy when I first moved to Narrm and Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung Country five years ago, keen to learn more about the technicalities of the practice and work across a range of jobs. I basically wanted to learn how to dig really square holes, and figure out how to help protect areas of particular Indigenous cultural heritage sensitivity by playing the legislative game. After years of mainly unpaid community activist work outside the tent, I wanted to figure out whether working inside the system could also lead to change. I want to recognise of course that this story is one of the privilege of education and white settler-hood. Being able to get a full time, well paying job doing work in a field that I generally love is such a rare occurrence, and I’ve been incredibly lucky to do so. But I also want to share the way that it gets beneath your skin when you’re amongst it, and how corporate culture can twist your ethics so easily to suit its own ends. Before I started the job, I was already pretty sus about working inside the tent and saw my time in the role as short term - one I would get into, learn what I needed to, and split. One, maybe two years max. My own theory of how social change happened was that impacted communities and those in solidarity with them push for legislative change through protest and organising, resisting and blockade, and then legislative change (and consultancies in turn) runs behind trying to keep up. I was strong in this analysis and was clear that the reason I was doing work in the commercial sphere was that it would allow me to develop my skills quickly, across a range of work, with lot of different Traditional Owner groups around the country, and figure which legislative levers could be pulled to slow down or limit destructive developments. There were other benefits too, of course. I was on a salary the kind of which I had never seen in my life. When I started in 2019 I was on $66k, and when I left in 2023 it was $119k, so it was decent wages. Suddenly I could fund all the causes that I wanted to, and do it comprehensively. I supported friends in a Mexican collective publish a book, supported Blak activists financially where I could, donated to campaigns and loaned money to friends, paid off my own uni debts and still had enough left over to live almost decadently, alone with a partner. It took me a while to realise that corporate life in a heritage consultancy has its own brand of internal ethics, and when working full time within its code, it starts to rub off on you. It starts first to creep in at the edges of your mind, and you make excuses along the way. For the first couple of years, I worked on any project that I was put on, regardless of whether I thought it was ethical or not. I was after all, there to smash and grab and leave with the inside knowledge, so maybe working for the bad guys was actually useful after all? I worked for Rio Tinto in Arnhem Land, a company that ended up destroying two Juukan Gorge rock shelters a couple of years later. They had done this in Arnhem Land too of course, companies like that develop ‘ethics’ only when they’re legally obliged to do so. Our consultancy was also working for Whitehaven Coal and Santos Gas at the time, both fossil fuel companies with an awful track record with Traditional Owners. We were also supporting VicRoads who were in the process of destroying a sacred Djab Wurrung landscape in Western Victoria. There were many others too of course, housing developments, local council infrastructure, National Park walking tracks; even pro bono work for Land Councils occasionally. The problem is that unless you’re the top dog in the consultancy, you’re not able to choose what work is coming in, and you’re a small cog in a much larger machine that is trying to get all these developments happening. Even if you totally disagree with the development that is occurring. You’re only able to work with and apply legislative regulations, and the clients always expect you to try and find a loopholes that allows their particular development to proceed. You tell yourself that without environmental and heritage legislation and you helping enforce it, these companies would just run rampant, and part of that I suppose is true. But the issue I have is that you can feel yourself changing from a position where you know initially that you don’t want to work for these clients and the developments they’re pursuing are pretty awful, to one where you get sucked into the logic that project completion and client satisfaction equals moral success. You’re working incredibly long hours to get reports over the line, and you’re putting your physical and mental health on hold for weeks and months to get this work done. After a few years of this, you’re burnt out, physically, mentally and emotionally. You of course want to feel like the sacrifices you make in your personal life for these clients and the consultancy and the impact this has on your body and your relationships has some sort of deeper value. But I felt like my capacity for creativity and moral judgement went out the window and was replaced wholesale with the corporate logic of false emergency and tight deadlines, where value didn’t equal anything greater than succeeding in meeting these. You know, I do wonder whether this is done intentionally, this frenetic pace and overwork, to keep us always half burnt out in order to not be questioning the suspect moral positioning of most of the work. So in the end, I stayed for longer than my two year plan. I was tired, so bought a car to be able to get to work and fieldwork easier than cycling or catching public transport (to be fair, sometimes where we worked this wasn’t possible). I was so tired I stopped seeing friends, stopped making food at home, ate out multiple times a week, drank alcohol almost every night. I was eating Coles Express sandwiches from the servo every day because there either wasn’t enough time in the morning to make lunch, or I had no energy. I was burning through cash, giving a lot to Coles and Woolies and feeling pretty shit about it. I missed the slow mornings with friends, the market shops, the wholesome food and the deep connection with the world. My life became home, travel, work, travel, home. Ad infinitum. I stayed for longer than two years also because of Covid. Work was something that gave my routine, income and just something to do. But it was still all consuming. To be honest, I feel like I only just retained my moral compass in the thick of it. I became manager of the archaeology team (hence the big pay jump), and was able to try and build fairer workplace processes, and better conflict management systems. I tried to ensure safe work conditions on building sites were enacted and breaches were dealt with effective. I tried to push back on blatantly destructive projects, and spoke up when management wanted us to work with fossil fuel companies. I tried to ensure when we were working on heritage outcomes with Traditional Owner groups, these also would include community outcomes. But in the end, you’re still operating within a legislative paradigm that is set up and controlled by a colonising state on stolen lands. I question if anyone would do this work if it wasn’t for the big pay cheques. It’s actually almost criminal the amount of money charged by consultancies to government to undertake the most basic of basic reporting and database checks. I wondered every day why so much of our work couldn’t have been done in house by local councils and state government and save a huge amount on public spending. In the end, I quit not because I felt like I had learned enough to answer my original question about the ability of working within the tent to make change. I’m sure there are people doing it, holding strong to their ethics and doing it well. I left because I felt my capacity for humanity being worn away and replaced by a corporate logic that prioritised making bank and client satisfaction above all. The experience was deeply disempowering and five years was more than enough. However, since quitting, I’ve also had to disentangle feelings that I’m doing the right thing with feeling like a failure for leaving my team in the shit to deal with future projects without me. I’ve had to live with knowing that the gossip about me leaving the company will be because I ‘couldn’t hack it’ (as had been said about other people who had left). And I’ve had to back away from seeing value in myself for having a well-paid, full-time job. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised, but you do get a lot of social kudos for those two things. Over five years I was able to save up more than $110k, and its been amazing to be able to think that I can do with that now in the future. But I do wish that I hadn’t taken on a full time position, and that I had remained engaged in activism and organising outside of work. One big takeaway is that I think if you’re going to try and work inside the system for a while, it’s important to remain with your feet on the ground, still doing the real work of social change in community. And so, my piles have healed finally; I’m walking more and having great sex again, eating better and drinking less. Still writing (as you can see), but sometimes under trees and sometimes in my head during long walks. Income is sporadic, but I’m feeling like I’m healing, re-discovering myself, and becoming human again. - SWS In the bocage.
A phrase from my childhood, knowing not what it meant. In the bocage. A gilded cage perhaps, a memory of elsewhere. In the bocage. It was French, of course. I was English. Worlds apart (40 miles, 1000 years). No idea of this apart from poetics. But I also did. In my own way. In my body. The bocage to my elders was fear and the unknown. It was nazis behind every turn, it was the ghost train BOO upon arrival. For those young boys who grew up on those beaches of Blackpool and Abersoch, the beaches of San Malo were a shock. It's like. Your tourism is a knife crime. In the bocage. What is this, in a place that was never landed upon. What is this, in the minds of the Breton boys who never foresaw a holiday in Portsmouth? What is this between language, between tongues? The bocage is hedgerow. That foreign sense becomes a word of home, of boundaries and complacency. Of security. A hedgerows that held berries and apples on my homecoming. The black juice spilling on my bike handles. The safety of badger and wren. I am safe here too, in the hedgerows, in the bocage. Am I safe here? There is a deep love of home. A home that defies its story. That story of the abuser, the oppressor. Those hedgerows are boundaries which grew, grew, thousands of years before, and reached out their tendrils, most likely, hundreds, thousands of years, hence. The bocage is another of those tendrils. The same. I haven't yet spoken of the landscape beneath, the way the ice age retreated and the soils remained, the way the Celts and their ways of seeing created these, these edges. In the bocage. The Green Man. The spirit of spring. He emerges swift and sudden. I am asleep on the Fleet and I am done. part 5 of along weetangera track
The common stories that drift to the surface out here are of the invaders. Soldier settlers, squatters, explorers. These are white Anglo-Celtic stories, masculine. I’m tired now of those colonial tales, the ones that rise to the surface in walking this track. I’m tired of this mitigation of Country. What does this personalisation of conquering and invasion do to our connection to this place? How do we move through as descendants of this legacy, with the knowledge of the past in the present? This era of six wire fences and gazetted trackways has only intensified its deathsqueeze on Country. Bypasses, town centres, bus stations, light rail. All will be built and people will come for these vistas, to inhabit and be. Can belonging emerge within this onslaught? What identity can be created within such hyperdrive development? The road feels like both a protective line and an access way. The track now snakes towards its crossing of the Molonglo at the Junction Ford, close against the great river. It has had so many routes across these gradually steepening hills with their bare and rocky saddles, gradually settling into a low lope across their north and western flanks. I walk the rough-hewn path lined with white skeletons, sentinels along the old way which runs parallel to the modern road. From here I can glimpse down towards the river and across to the mountains. The vistas are opening. Feet are sore now, and images staccato. River. Mountain. Tree. River. Tree. Mountain. Zoetropic flicker. Toward the end of the day it is always hot out here, a flyblown anvil struck by hard rays. The cascading Brindabella ridges merge slowly into a deepening morass. Now a blackblank cutout against a fireforged sky. Out here the Ginninderra Creek is a corroboree ground, below ancestral figures and close by initiation sites. Out here scarred trees stalk across the ridgelines. Out here the stories are of songlines and water, of the Little Eagle’s migration to the Northern Territory’s waterholes along ancient sky-tracks. As I walk, the red orange dust rises behind me with each footfall. The wind blows it east. Above me in the everblue there are two Wedgetails soaring, their eyes on the traveller. Near here the track branches, one finger towards the Ginninderra Falls and the northern crossing of the Murrumbidgee at Cusacks Crossing, one south towards the Junction. Now the northern route is sequestered behind cyclone fencing and orange mesh, graded by the construction of new suburbia. Ginninderra Falls in flood must be seen to be believed, a Niagara on the Murrumbidgee (and must be believed to be seen, hidden as it is behind locked gates and aggressive signage, as if words can resist the desire for water). I’m nearing the end of the road now. It has a tiredness to it as it descends the hill as I do, and disappears beneath the West Molonglo sewerage plant. A stink kicks up. The river scythes through the steep gyhll to the west, flaps against the rock. I tumble down the slope, keen against cliff and race. Near the river junction a shaft into the rock face, low and dark. Four foot adit leading into dim places, covered with intolerable brambles (black clinging seeds). An old mine seeking the allure of gold. The grand story here is water. The way the landscape has been shaped and cut by Murrumbidgee and Molonglo flow. But I am too tired to tell these stories now. All that is left is the feeling of the cooling day and the shade of the held hills. We all crave these whorling pools, this upwelling, whelming into the last rays of the day. Even (especially?) developers thirst for water. I cross the Junction and transcend. Here, the Old Weetangera Road consummates its craving for Uriarra Road, desire sated in the dusty intersection halfway up a lonely hillside. At this point I turn for the first time. I see now a sewerage plant, now a surgical scar, hairline wide, ascending the opposite bank. It traces back over the hills out of sight. In the end is the beginning. part 4 of along weetangera track
The old track gains higher ground out of the swamp and cuts close by Belconnen Way and out towards the west. It’s under houses and shops now, under roads and parkland. Some old gums remain which would once have lined its path, but it’s harder to see, harder to imagine in this alignment. It’s ironic, really, that the abandoned sections of track retains memories of what would have previously been a lifeline, the red thread connecting all stories in this valley. It is in the places where the road has been upgraded and continued to be used that the past is harder to grasp. What does it mean to walk beside the present Way, along old routes barely known, barely remembered? What is this sense of pilgrimage beneath the bitumen? There is a desire perhaps to keep this hidden, this knowledge and love. Not to bring stories to light, to corrupt them through epistemological filters which shut down the complexity of reality into simplistic narratives. Conceptual darkness blurs the edges of what can be seen and told, keeping past lives more whole and real than our present day remembering. The way we engage in past peoples’ lives is an intensely personal experience. I’ve found this in serendipitous moments in archives, turning the yellowed pages of an old scrapbook or opening a blue-grey box with hundreds of sheaves of typed folio and to happen upon a letter or a photograph. These are part of the story of re-emergence. To be the one that sets these stories in stone or upon paper is perhaps to corrupt and solidify this experience of rebirth. The other afternoon with a beautiful friend of years I cycle part of the bikeway that traces the old road. We go with Tim 'the Yowie Man' to talk about the track for his Canberra Times column. He's excited and passionate about the urban exploration, seeing things that I've never even glanced at before, old quarries, tree scars. My friend also has a way of evoking the landscape’s stories to make you feel aligned to it. For myself, I feel performative and rushed and the whole experience seems corruptive of the emergence of uncovering. Later, I speak to voices on the phone that tell me of their love of a horse 50 years prior out on the plains. I know the horse’s name before they tell me their own, before they ask mine. These moments feel enlivening. I worry about delving too deep though, and what might emerge from this darkness. I hear of limestone caves beneath Civic and Lake Burley Griffin that have ochred images painted upon their enclosed walls, fluid now. Out of the bog and we’re into Weetangera, namesake. The name first applied to the whole of this valley it seems, it’s now constrained between arterial roads and old black and white signs which solidify the name: WEETANGERA. Weetangera, Weetangerra, Wetangera, Wittanjirra, Witanjira, other words in other times. Weetangerra, Ginninderra, Canberra. Gerra, Derra, Berra. All lyrical, all Ngun(n)awal, all roll off the tongue. The origin of the name Weetangera is quoted in quite a few places with certainty. ‘To suck or drink greedily’, often with reference to the springs in the area. There are fewer places that state who first made this claim. That title seems to go to the notorious anthropologist Frederic Slater, who is known for his pseudoarchaeological claims that the First Australians came ‘out of Egypt’ in the Neolithic. In 1934, Slater writes in Mankind, the old version of The Australian Journal of Anthropology, a highly likely apocryphal story of how places near Canberra received their current names by an early surveyor questioning a scared Ngun(n)awal boy in a thunderstorm. However, ‘Wittanjerra’ is listed by Slater as a one of the supposed Dhar-rook (Darug) words which were imported to the region by Darug men accompanying early surveyors. It may be, he muses, that after a long, thirsty, dry march the travellers drank their fill at a stream. Slater mentions no references, nor where he heard these supposed stories from. Regardless, Weetangera is without doubt an ancient name, and along with ‘Ginninderra’, the first applied to this valley. The road mounts the rise of Coulter Drive and glides west down towards the springs. The traffic noise has grown louder over the last couple of centuries. Trees planted in the 1960s close in here, mostly natives but with some exotic tinges. The rich, dark green of the pines colour the left of my vision, underpinned by the light orange brown of dead needles. We’re near the site of the original Weetangera School, looping down from the undulating plains towards its old position close to a spring and creekline. Knowledge close to water, welling and flowing forth. It’s here that the heat is palpable, rolling in waves from the west where it seems to gather in mountain gullies and rise over ridges, toppling eastwards into the Belconnen suburbs. I first glimpse the Brindabellas from the rise. We’re toward the edge of suburbia now. It huddles inward upon itself, enfolded, lives breathing with their backs to paddocks. Cul-de-sac aveoli. This is a cutting edge which hasn’t dulled for fifty years. Concrete gives way to pasture within metres. Cars to horses. Movement across time within space. I come by an old tumbledown applebox out here on the slopes of the land down toward the Molonglo. We’re close to white water now, the burnt fields bare with ancient gums. This one I’m out to visit with a historian and an artist, Mary and Sally, we’re here in search of almost forgotten traces.This is the old Pig Tree of the Lands End station, at the old edge of the known world. From here the rim of the western sky is pushed up by the teal blue of the Brindabella range and crushed against white-grey cirrus. To the south the pasture aches away to the deeper tones of the Molonglo’s cut and the lego-block sandpit of the Denman Prospect. The raw wound of country on the opposite bank sits stark against the mountains, slowly healing over but forever altered, a bone mending askew. Below here the old road shoots west across country, breaking out from under its concreted shroud. Its now grassy surface and verge drains stand in stark relief in the late afternoon sun, just to the south of what is now the Pegasus Riding School. The drains have carried water over time to the point they have eroded and channelled, forming a new watercourse. The erosion gully sits sometimes beside the road, sometimes one with it. Up there at the old homestead, now office, is a waterhole and spring, part of a line of water bodies that first would have brought travellers out this way. The waterhole stands in contrast to the dams below. It is ringed by gums and a pool fence, plastic zebras wait close by in the shade. part 3 of along weetangera track.
I am always fascinated by the possibility that the Capital of Australia could have been in Dalgety, 170km south of Canberra. Dalgety would have been the site of this city, planned as an Act of Parliament, and it would have been that landscape and those mountains and plains that would have drawn us there. In 1906, the Prime Minister wanted Dalgety to be the location, and it was only through various acts of lobbying and personalities that the Canberra region became the chosen location. I am here, we are here, because of this. How my own life would have been different, I think, if it would have been Dalgety and the Snowy River that would have claimed my heart, rather than this place. Which Elders would be the ones we speak to and hold dear, and where would Parliament have been? Would this choice have changed politics in Australia, would the landscape have influenced decisions? Would the time taken on the train to get there from Sydney and from Melbourne have altered concepts of country and identity? Undoubtedly so, but in what way is unclear. That attributed Soviet adage seems relevant: the future is certain, but the past in unpredictable. Canberra occasionally feels like a pastiche, the desire to intimate other great cities coming before local need. There is a longing palpable here, amongst those resident, to live up to the name of Capital, to whitewash away cringe, to layer over institution and symbolism. It tends towards an opportunity shop of policy and design, each cutting edge, each outmoded. Confusion around how to connect to this mish-mash seems to abound. The triangle incised a national symbolism on Ngun(n)awal Country overlaying a lived and local landscape with the symbolism of capitol and nation removing all trace of the former to meet the needs of the latter. But the ideal feels corrupted, in this need for ground as if really, if all else was equal, capitol could become a hovercraft, supported by its cushion of air overlaying all parts of geography across all time and space That capitol sites itself on Ngun(n)awal land takes away from its desire for ubiquitousness, of normalcy of the colonial construct that renders capitol necessary Reinstating the locality, the specific history and knowledge of this place breathes life into Canberra, into Ngambri, into whatever epithets it needs to thrive and be reclaimed against its rendering as symbol Perhaps it's ironic, but fitting, that Skywhale is to Canberra, an odd balloon aloft, buffering and buffeted, disconnected from the earth but finally, finally dependent upon it as the warm air brings it back to ground A few months ago as I was walking in one of the city’s newer developments, I came across a group of rope access technicians, harnessed up and dropping from the rooftop several stories above me. They were cursing hard about the state of the building on the way down. They spoke of shoddy developments and poor choices to build immediately on fill that should have been left for at least seven years. They spoke of the developers using plywood cladding that was sucking in moisture and falling apart only a few years after construction. They spoke of having spiders come out of the tiny crannies of the edifice because the architects had not thought about where they would live their spider lives amongst the glass, concrete and MDF. What would a spider friendly city look like? As it is, the aesthetic from afar dominates the gaze (and the capital/capitol), and it takes a the trapeze artist’s appreciation of the built microcosm to take in the reality of decrepitude. ... When you look at a map, your eye is drawn immediately to those yellow splodges of settlement, the linear patterns of the roads and the railways. It tends to overlook the absences between them, the matt grey spaces, neither park nor forest. The very colour used to show them is indicative of what the surveyors saw in the land, the verge-sides and rough ground, the small rough commons squeezed between road and fence. These are the forgotten places, the leftovers. Look closely and each is a myriad of complete worlds, often ringed by blackberry pikemen protecting their liminal kingdoms. The butterflies signal land over the horizon, dipping and flitting down beyond the line of sight. Each square metre a microtopography, mountainous anthills, an old twig that lost hope amongst a tangled halcyon utopia. Ou topos - the perfect place? Or Utopos - the no place? These are spaces that do not technically exist. They have no names and no purpose, they are places to pass through on the way to elsewhere. A stroke of the policy pen appears to give life to the forgotten scrub. On newer maps, these areas become reserves and parks, marked as bright green, as if the line bounding them can somehow increase their lucidity overnight in this rain-shadow. Their real colours are grey and orange, vast spectra. But a conceptual green abounds, we remain beholden to a European desire for the greenwoods and faeries. How can one be-long in the midst of this longing? Is there ought to belonging apart from being in longing? The old track feels closer to consummating this desire. The saddle here lets us ridge over the faultline and on towards the Ginninderra Plains. There are bush sculptures up here made of trash, car tyres and plastic. Hidden amongst the scars. Under roads, under stadia, under hospitals the track runs down now, banked on either side, flying above the rocky redness. I receive an email from a retired road engineer who speaks of this microgeography in cold, technical terms: There is not a lot to be said about the road's construction, it’s a basic unsealed rural road with little earthworks, and unfortunate alignment through Flea Bog. Generally, such roads have a v-drain, ie, side ditch drain, along their up-hill side portions, or both sides where the surrounds are flat, to try to keep the trafficable surface and roadbase as dry (water/mud free) as possible, except where the road is entirely infill of course, but there was little fill, in its entire length. Those remnant drains now help locate the old alignment when the pasture is not too long to hide it. There is little emotion here, but I sense some humour. And the ‘unfortunate alignment’. Ah, Flea Bog. We’re off the ridge now and down into it. There’s a triangle of old bush and regrowth hemmed in by Copland Drive and Belconnen Way and the v-drains offer a runway through. Flea Bog Flat. It’s a name not on any of the old maps, today only acknowledged in some moist ground to the north of the new arterial and the playing fields to the south where the groundspeople must struggle against rising moisture after rain. It’s turgid. Slow going. I wonder, why wasn’t the road rerouted here? In other sections it was in the late 1800s to avoid moisture or eroded creek crossings. Finneran’s Road cuts south over Black Mountain from near here. Today it’s a beautiful dirt track route through the Aranda Bushland, following the low ridges over the skirts of the mountain. Perhaps this was the wet-weather route? For old timers, Flea Bog was notorious. But many roads in the district could have their days. Samuel Shumack recalled in the 1920s that on the Yass-Queanbeyan Road, ‘the east side was mud about three feet deep for three chains or more, and like glue. On the west side it was a foot to eighteen inches deep, with the consistency of thin gruel’. Roads as glue. Roads as porridge. Roads as flows, as liquid channels. Philip Ball imagines in Critical Mass the ‘preposterous idealisation’ where ‘particles become people’, and refers to the fluid dynamics of road traffic, of ghost jams and breaking wave-forms. But here Schumack speaks of the fluidity of roads themselves and the impact of this upon those travelling along them, constrained in space by six wire fences, dysfunctional drains and adjacent colonial property rights. Here in the bog time slows too. It’s easy to imagine that the thrumming of the new road away to the south is wind alone and we’re a million miles from the present. I’ve seen kangaroos here, girt by the tarmac. Gossan Hill hulks over me to the north. Blacks Creek swings around to the west of the rise. Along this waterway in the 1860s Nellie Hamilton and her family still camped on their Country. By then it was also referred to by those who benefitted from the invasion as ‘Emu Ridge’. The Emu Bank run was close to the north against Ginninderra Creek; there were big birds here. Gossan Hill is a place of old ochre quarries and artefact scatters, the remains of lives and loves. Carl Brown, Ngunnawal Elder, lived close by here too until recently, near ancestral homes. He passed away recently, far too young, holding knowledge, but having shared what he knew for decades, sitting and walking on Country. Softy spoken and present, powerful in his way, his interest in these old ways was a thread that linked us all. part 2 of along weetangera track
Exploration of the past reverts to the flay. Tiny incisions are made, pinprick by pinprick, slow dismembering of the present, digging down into previous layers. The skin itches back upon itself, it is a death that comes slowly even as (and because) the underside is being revealed. Attachment to the insulating rush of time peels (piels) away and the dermis stands palpitating and uninsulated, unsure how to be and unto what to hold tight. It is epistemocide; knowledge death. Wattle and Clianthus are present here, planted in arboreal transformations of what used to be a temperate upland grassland, overrun by cattle and invasive grasses in the last two centuries. These trees and their namesake streets are relative newcomers here; older fellows remain living in amongst the adolescents. I walk the line of Clianthus Street, following the old trackway. In older aerial photographs the newly graded layout is only metres to the south of the worn dirt path, drawn to the same alignment as a meniscus creeps up the side of the vial, enamoured of its context. There are old yellowboxes here, dotted in front yard and back, traipsing across parkland and up the hillside, standing ancient and crinkled, looking down with lofty heads. They are survivors and they can tell us about the old ways. Once, I sat for a while amongst the temperate rainforest, far from here, in sandstone country in Gumbaynggirr Country. My circle of rocks on that west facing slope, above the creek, was home for nigh on five days and four nights. No water or food held me there, my stomach and mind slowly turning toward and being enfolded by those living forms around me. Stuck between two boulders, I slept in the shadow of a honeycombed cave, scooped out of one of them so that one ducked under a low plinth and stood inside with a hundred fist-shaped hollows. In the evening, as I lay there in the dirt, the unseen colony of microbats swelled out, crying against the night almost beyond reach of my hearing, flitting down and around my head as they made their way into the gathering dusk. I was surrounded by Banksias, and they spoke in quiet whispers to me on the fourth day. Now we are forced onto new lines, our bodies constrained by the cracked footpaths (‘1988’ / ‘hello from the past’ / anarchist ‘Ⓐ’) and front lawn civility, by hedges that stand for fences. The yellowbox makes no such negotiation. We have gathered around them on this plain, seeking succour from the memories held in their bodies as much as the shade offered from a seething summer. The young wattles burn underneath, licking the older trunks. Currawongs drop onto branches, paddling through a milky sky, their calls echoing in the most open of spaces. The skies over Lyneham are a multitude of greys at this time of year. Dense cloud banks hold the city in tension in August, patches of light grey threaten to break through. Clianthus climbs Dryandra, tree souls giving way to others. Banksia, Nardoo, Yarrow. ... I leave Dryandra and step onto the dirtgrass verge of the nature park. The concrete lane begins where the modern road crumbles to an end, a few centimetres lower, a lighter shade of grey. It cuts between two solid wooden gateposts impaled with rusted iron hinges and giant nails. As I step onto this track, I feel for the first time that I am heading through one of those incisions in the present. Track beneath roadway still when tarmac peels back. To my right, the tussocked bush leaps over my head and upwind. There are mobs of kangaroo grazing up there, harried by unleashed dogs. I have walked this ridge almost daily since I moved to Lyneham. Its bulk at my back as I sleep feels strong, I sense being held by this land. Before the building of this suburb there was a tip off the back side of the ridge, just out of site beyond the rise. The landscape up there is pockmarked with diggings and with ancient rusted hulks, like cast ships caught on rocks, breaking up with every swell. A few weeks ago, I went walking up here with my friend and their dog. She was offleash and flying around the bush, keeping her feet clear of the detritus of the old dump, and her eyes open for kangaroos. She was a fizz of unleashed energy, part-wolfhound, all pup. We trekked up the steep slopes to the top of the ridge, amongst the dark pines planted in the fifties as a windbreak for the new suburbs against the brittle eastwards sweep of the winter winds, fresh off the Brindabellas and bringing with it the feel of snowdrift. Here the narrow, yellow-earth track perches and loops, a small wagtail zipping from twig to twig. Looking back over one’s shoulder at this point, you see the lay of the Canberra valley. Its dark greens and reds in early spring smear together a hundred thousand planted beings lining concrete canals and asphalt veins. The eye rises, drawn by the rim of sky toward the line of the crimped ridge across the way, the ironbark cleaving to it like tadpoles heads stuck in a lilypad, on the verge of letting go, ready to float on up into that cirrus morass. To the left, the ridgeline arches up to a light green-grey summit, sweeping down and up again as the eye courses to the right, higher still. This is Ainslie and Majura, on the old map inverted peaks, but not really separate, and perhaps this interchangability has always been present. Twin summits held by a low-slung slackline of remnant bush. The word Canberra speaks of cleavage, of the caress between these mountains. A specific cleavage between two bodies of earth, place-based and localised, it is a word enamoured of this valley, in this Country. Canberra is Nganbra, Ngambri, Kamberri, it is a word so specific, to mean this part of the world, this ten by five valley, that hollow between those two rises, the creek passing through. A word so specific it does not replicate anywhere on earth, a word so of this Country that it has remained etched into it. It refers to nothing else. A name that tells of journey and home. The English language has these names too, but here like weeds they are out of place. They are titles, named after so many white men, anthropomorphising and abstracting the non-human to a degree that this mountain becomes Ainslie, John’s meadow. English feels dizzying in this context, disorientating us from really knowing Canberra. In English, Canberra now means Capital, Canberra now means Control. The names sprout up like wild brassica and petty spurge, useful in their own ways but cleaving us from a sense of truly understanding this place. For instance, we think of Black Mountain. Solid and solitary. But where really does the mountain end and begin? When does the bulk of earth that slowly yawns up into the sky become ‘mountain’ from ‘non-mountain’? Weetangera track crosses its tail, or does it? When does language apply here? The Ngun(n)awal language is being reclaimed and rebuilt by Elders from memories kept alive and from those old word lists collected by late 1800s anthropologists. These words are so important when we’re living in this place, they arose here, they are deeply embedded in this landscape, as is the culture that sustained them and the knowledge that those words have held. 20,000 years is a long, long time, but it is probably the very least number of years that people have been living and using these uplands. We talk about Canberra as a new city, and bemoan its lack of history and authenticity. Well, murra bidgee mullangari, the pathways to the ancestors are being kept alive. And Ngun(n)awal words are the footprints upon that path. ... The bush really closes in up here on the ridgeline, beyond the tangle of rusted barbed wire. The old road is still so visible, cut into the hillside on the left and banked down on the right. Under the roaring river of Gungahlin Drive and the stadium it goes, up over the ridge near the hospital where it runs atop banking through the regrowth. The tangle is a fight. There are paint-by-numbers gums here, burnt hollow bases, holding finches that whirr away on the approach. Someone has cut the saplings back and they splay away from each footfall. White and grey dappled trunks are a forest of tooth picks, skin like wet paper. Iron erodes from the hillside gullies, some lost civilisation. There’s a game on. Ten thousand voices scour the air, held upon the easterly. It takes a while for the sound to differentiate from the road roar but at the top of the ridge is it palpable, like waves the chants overlay and roll back. The low cumulus hang softly orange and echo. part 1 of along weetangera track
What is the interaction between intention and inscription? The former alters chemicals, alters muscles, alters footfall. The latter emerges. Over space. Over time. Movement becomes footpad becomes track. Sometimes centralised, thought out around campfires or on office chairs. Sometimes without thought, emergent as generations pass. Bound within landscapes and waterscapes which limit or direct, alive with unseen hands holding desires. What is the desire hidden beneath the trackway’s form, that rough runnel loose of land, dirtbare guideline? What desire compacts soil and withers roots? We live in the dreams of some ancestors and in the dystopia of others. Old Weetangera Road is one such dream, born as it is of steep creekbanks and ridgeline saddles, valleys and the pull of great rivers. Its modern form cascades over bitumen as Belconnen Way, four lanes of greygrit held by concreted culverts and vulcanised under the press of tyres. When it was younger, six-wire fences coaxed it along the plains of kangaroo grass under the knotted eyes of tumbledown yellowbox. Its footprints lighter then, humus scarring across the paddocks. Before the time of straight lines, before the coming of concrete, the track lived between high points and water. Signposts remain in chipped rock and sacred tree scars. I would like to write a love song to this old way, a crease-line on the past landscape of this valley, present still and knowable perhaps. I would like to feel attachment to these places that have claimed home to my body these last five years. I would like to write a piece that walks this track at 4km per hour, and in doing so traces though gentle noticings. This is writing that has emerged through walking. I would also like to work with language that traces the landscape forms. To be uplifting when going uphill and degrading when heading down. For the feel to reflect the shade and the light of the journey. I would like it to tire as it progresses. Stop and rest in the shade when I do. Become light-headed and giddy with me. To seep into stupor at times. Perhaps this seems contrived and in a way, it is meant to be. Contriving stems from the Latin ‘to compare’, echoing down the ages to become ‘to imagine’. Both are applicable here. I am inspired by audiobooks, of driving and walking landscape with words cascading in the ears, overtaking processes of thought, and entrapping one in the burble of words. I also think of audioguides in art galleries, the disembodied voice leading one from painting to etching to sculpture. Why not a contrived walking tour of the gallery of our lives? It is also the microautobiography of one four hour moment, enraptured within a landscape, moving from city to edgelands, from ridge and mountain to creek and river. A fishnet out in the midstream of life, catching and filtering and distilling moments as I walk. ... Where does it begin? At dawn, at a dam, wetland, fringed by lomandra, planted by policy and held by memory. It begins amongst ducks and crows, amongst flocks of cockatoos and galahs, amongst apostlebirds, magpies (karrugangs) and chough mauls. On the creaking swings of an old playground, culverted creeks and biting breeze. You start on a mid-summer’s evening, as the sun is gathering in the west over a quietening and darkening expanse. You begin as the light (dhurrawaŋ) narrows to a point, and slowly, like a drawing away down a long corridor, the velvet shrouds vision and thought. The old track begins here. It wends westwards over the hill and up onto the plateau, down again towards the creeks of Belconnen, old Weetangera. Onwards to the great river, sparkling though at that point, in its adolescence. In the end is the beginning, too, depending on the flow along this track. The track’s intersection with the grand thoroughfare through the Canberra valley, to the wetlands, then a dam, then the Schumack Trig. This is flatland musing, and the track slowly courses upwards now, putting some bite into my steps. The sounds of the city produce it.
Sweet potato steam whistles. Trash truck wails echo street performers. Tamales Oaxaqueños. Tamales Oaxaqueños! I cross the calles against the surging tide of traffic. I am given way. I carry toilet paper and unidos mujeres coffee. Ground. Capitalismo on every street corner. Delicious and piquant. Informal lessons en Españiol on squatted seats amongst fanzines. -es/-xs (gender neutral/gender fuck) alternatives to gendered adjectives. No es El. Problems using these to queer patriarchal police and government spaces. Always -os. What is love but possession? One letter, amor/amore. The power of language in conceptualising the body. Mine closeted in the Metro between Pino Suárez and Zócalo. Salida, always exiting. The word 'epistemicide'. Death. The abandonment of one thought or conceptual structure to make way for another. Corruption, or a cleansing of the slate/state. What does 20,000 strong mean in a city of 25 million? Murder and death. Nine days of celebration and commiseration. Death at the centre. ¡Samir Vive, la lucha sigue! Obramesa and the long, drawn-out afternoon. Live in the present, they say
As if the past and the future are easily divorced and laid out linear like pulsing veins Live in the moment Like looking at diaries from aeons past to see how far you've come is an anathema to calm Like dreaming of a world that gives space to stretch into is something that acts against Like forgetting your history and your ancestry and the things that make us tick will mean freedom And not the opposite As if giving up control of our narrative will not mean it will be replaced by those with money to burn Perhaps the present is inescapable, but when I dig deep in the cool soil, and plant a tiny seed, and cover it up with a loose clod, both the past and the future are here, bleeding into each other. The planes come home to roost
Mugga's bulk at right, east my back rough against cut rock that rises Red Hill, Kambri, Ngaambri stalwart of Kurrajong watchman of the south lime green exotics brown-orange Eucalypts The broken hill catches water run off of aeons Pialligo in line of site home of a thousand thousand campfires horizons are held in the gentle bowl I am home, I am home in the red hard soil and tough fragile rock Mugga glows orange grey and lowers into the early dusk the drip drop of Rosella against the backwash of engine scrawk of corvid and cockatoo kangaroos mind their own Yellowbox and Red Gum, living still taking it all in as their views change Blue bells under their ankles tiny ferns the day ends Any exploration of the past reverts to a flay. Tiny incisions are made, pinprick by pinprick, slow dismembering of the present to dig down to previous layers. The skin itches back upon itself, it is a death that comes slowly even as (and because of) the underside is being revealed. Attachment to the insulating rush of time peels (piels) away and the epidermis stands palpitating and uninsulated, unsure how to be and unto what to hold tight.
Wattle and Clianthus are present in our suburb, planted by Charles Weston in his arboreal transformations of what used to be a temperate upland grassland, if overrun by cattle and invasive grasses in the last two centuries. But these trees and their namesake streets are relative newcomers here, older fellows remain living in amongst the adolescents. The line of Clianthus Street follows the old trackway, in the older aerial photographs of this area the dirt line is only several metres north of the newly graded layouts, still drawn to the same alignments like a meniscus is drawn up the side of the vial, enamoured of its context. There are old yellowboxes here, dotted in front yard and back, traipsing across parkland and up the hillside, standing ancient and crinkled looking down with lofty heads. They are survivors and they can tell us about the old ways. Now we are forced onto new lines, our bodies constrained by the cracked footpaths (‘1988’ ‘hello from the past’ ironic ‘A’) and front lawn civility, from hedges that stand for fences in this part of the world. The yellowbox makes no such negotiation, we have gathered around them on this plain, as if we are seeking succour from the memories held in their bodies as much as the shade offered from burning summer. The young wattles burn underneath, licking the older trunks. Currawongs drop onto branches, paddling through a milky sky, their calls echo even in the most open of spaces. The skies over Lyneham are a multitude of greys at this time of year. Dense cloud banks hold the city in tension in August, patches of light grey threaten to break through. Clianthus climbs Dryandra, tree souls giving way to others. Banksia, Nardoo, Yarrow. Once, I sat for a while amongst the temperate rainforest, far from here, in sandstone country. My circle of rocks on that west facing slope, above the creek, was home for nigh on five days and four nights. No water or food held me there, my stomach and mind slowly turning toward and being enfolded by those living essences around me. Stuck between two boulders, I slept in the shadow of a honeycombed cave, scooped out of one of them so that one ducked under a low plinth and stood inside with a hundred fist-shaped hollows. In the evening, as I lay there in the dirt, the unseen colony of microbats living in those places came out, crying against the night almost beyond reach of my hearing, flitting down and around my head as they made their way out into the gathering dusk. Outside during the day, I had made a simple sundial to cast the time and to retain some sense of my own body, the sense of living alone with nothing for my mind to latch onto seemed a threat to my sense of self. Banksias spoke their meaning to me after the third day. I leave Dryandra and step onto the dirtgrass verge of the nature park. The concrete lane begins where the modern road crumbles to an end, a few centimetres lower, a lighter shade of grey. It immediately cuts between two solid wooden gateposts impaled with rusted iron hinges and giant nails. I step onto this track and feel for the first time that I am heading through one of those incisions in the present, the track beneath the roadway still there when the skin peels back. To my right, the tussocked bush leaps over my head and upwind. There are mobs of kangaroo grazing up there, harried by unleashed dogs. I have walked this ridge almost daily since I moved to this place, its bulk at my back as I sleep feels strong, I sense being held by this land. Before the building of this suburb there was a tip off the back side of the ridge, just out of site beyond the rise. The landscape up there is pockmarked with diggings and with ancient rusted hulks, like cast ships caught on rocks, breaking up with every swell. A few weeks ago, I went walking up here with my friend Kelda and her dog, Arna. Arna was offleash and flying around the bush, keeping her feet clear of the detritus of the old dump, and her eyes open for kangaroos. She was a fizz of unleashed energy, part-wolfhound, all pup. We trekked up the steep slopes to the top of the ridge, amongst the dark pines planted in the fifties as a windbreak for the new suburbs against the brittle eastwards sweep of the winter winds, fresh off the Brindabellas and bringing with it the smell and feel of snowdrift. Here the narrow, yellow-earth track perches and loops, like a small wagtail zipping from twig to twig. I am always fascinated by the possibility that the Capital of Australia could have been in Dalgety, 170km to the south of Canberra. That would have been the site of this city, planned as an Act of Parliament, and it would have been that landscape and mountains, plains and language that would have drawn us there. The Prime Minister in 1906 wanted Dalgety to be the location, and it was only through various acts of lobbying and personalities that this region became the location. I am here, we are here, because of this. How my own life would have been different, I think, if it would have been Dalgety and the Snowy River, the mountains out there that would have claimed my heart, than this place. Which Elders would be the ones we speak to and hold dear, and where would Parliament have been. Would this choice have changed politics in Australia, would the landscape have influenced decisions? Would the time taken on the train to get there from Sydney and from Melbourne have altered concepts of country and identity? Undoubtedly, but in which way is unsure. The future is certain, but the past in unpredictable. Looking back over one’s shoulder at this point, you see the lay of the Canberra valley with its dark greens and reds in early spring of a hundred thousand planted beings lining concrete canals and bitumen veins. The eye rises, drawn by the rim of sky toward the line of the crimped ridge across the way, the yellowbox and ironbark cleaving to the line like tadpole's head stuck in a lilypad, on the verge of letting go, ready to float on up into that cirrus morass. To the left, the ridgeline arches up to a light green-grey summit, sweeping down and up again as the eye courses to the right, higher still. This is Ainslie and Majura, on the old map inverted peaks, but not really separate, and perhaps this interchangability has always been present. Twin summits held by a low-slung slackline of remnant bush. The word Canberra speaks of cleavage, of the defile between these mountains. Canberra is Nganberra, Ngambri, Kamberri, it is a word so specific, to mean this part of the world, this 10km by 5km valley, that hollow between those two rises, the creek passing through. A word so specific it does not replicate anywhere on earth, a word so of this Country that it has remained etched into it. Canberra now means Capital, Canberra now means Control, Canberra now means Chaos. All these meanings fluid, one can never step in the same stream twice. But cleavage first and foremost, specific cleavage. Cleavage from the past and from the English language. The sense of what it means to be present and connected to a landscape. What words do we have, tools that offer an ability to communicate, but also drive a division between us and the world. But Canberra means nothing like this also. It refers to a specific cleavage, between two bodies of earth, place-based and localised, it is a word enamoured of this valley, in this Country. It refers to nothing else. A direct word that tells of journey and home. Perhaps English has these words too, but they are titles, named after humans and people, anthropomorphising the non-human to a degree that this mountain is Ainslie, this one Black’s. Where does the mountain end and begin? When does the bulk of earth that slowly yawns up into the sky become ‘mountain’ from ‘non-mountain’? When does language apply here? The Ngunnawal language is being reclaimed and rebuilt by Elders from those old word lists collected by late 1800s anthropologists, and from memories kept alive. These words are so important when we’re living in this place, they arose here and about, they are deeply embedded in this landscape, as is the culture that sustained them and the knowledge that those words have held. 20,000 years is a long, long time, but it is probably the very least number of years that people have been living and using these uplands. We talk about Canberra as a new city, and bemoan its lack of history and authenticity. Well, murra bidgee mullangari, the pathways to the ancestors are being kept alive. And Ngunnawal words are the footprints upon that path.
18.7km, four hours Beginnings/Wetlands Where does it begin? At dawn, at a dam, wetland, fringed with lomandra, planted by policy and held by memory. It begins amongst ducks and crows, amongst flocks of cockatoos and galahs, amongst apostlebirds, magpies (karrugangs) and chough mauls. On the creaking swings of an old playground, culverted creeks and biting breeze. You start on a mid-summer’s evening, as the sun is gathering in the west over a quietening and darkening expanse. You begin as the light (dhurrawaŋ) narrows to a point, and slowly, like a drawing away down a long corridor, the velvet shrouds vision and thought. The old track begins here. It wends westwards over the hill and up onto the plateau, down again towards the creeks of Belconnen. Onwards to the old river, sparkling though at that point, in its adolescence. In the end is the beginning, too, depending on the flow along this track. The wetland could be the ending, the track’s intersection with the grand thoroughfare through the Canberra valley, to the wetlands, then a dam, then the Schumack Trig. I would like to write a love song to this old track, a crease-line on the past landscape of this valley, present still and knowable perhaps. I would like to feel attachment to these places that have claimed home to my body the last five years. I would like to write a piece that walks this track at 4km per hour, and in doing so trace though processes and noticings. At 18.7km, this track is four hours long, and so might be this tract. How many words is that? 24,000, at 100 words per minute. As long as the word limit of an honours thesis, but one naturally instigated, and one perhaps more heartfelt. The conductor of a folk choir I was in when I first joined told me that I had a classical vocalisation, trained for years on Latin masses. He said to find my natural voice. I am learning to let go, now, and this is one for me. It’s not for anyone else to read, really, no desire for publication beyond a love of creation and attachment. This is a booklet has emerged through walking. It had no intention other than to chart the thoughts and feelings that emerged from being in that place. It is an experiment in that way. It’s an experiment in my own terms to bring that great tradition of nature writing, exemplified by the British tradition, into the landscape of my own life. The great colonised Countries of Australia. How will that play out when exploration is not Indigenous? I would also like to work with language that traces this landscape. I’d like it to be uplifting when going uphill and degrading when heading down, as a first instance, but also the feel to reflect the shade and the light of the journey. I would like it to tire as it progresses. Stop and rest in the shade when I do. Become light-headed and giddy when I do. Seep into stupor at times. Perhaps this seems contrived. In a way, it is meant to be. Contriving stems from the Latin ‘to compare’, aching down the ages to become ‘to imagine’. Both are applicable here, as I look to compare words and lived reality (if they can ever be seen as entirely different). But also imagination, which allows for the filtering of the lived experience into the understood reality. I am inspired by audiobooks, of driving and walking landscape with their words cascading in the ears, overtaking processes of thought, and entrapping one in the bubble of words. Also by the walking tour of galleries, from painting to etching to sculpture. Why not a contrived walking tour of the gallery of our lives? It is also the microautobiography of one four hour moment, enraptured within a landscape, moving from city to edgelands, from ridge and mountain to creek and river. A fishnet out in the midstream of life, catching and filtering and distilling moments as I walk. This is flatland musing, and the track slowly courses upwards now, putting some edginess into my steps. ‘We Just Needed a Place to Live’:Canberra Young People’s Ongoing Fight for Affordable Housing14/2/2018
by Steve Skitmore and Emma Cupitt First published in Demos Journal The history of Canberra can be cut many ways. It is, for all intents and purposes, a history of a semi-alpine valley imposed with the burden of Capitol – scoured clean and designed for 25,000 inhabitants, the abstracted ‘smooth faeries’ of Ian Warden’s[1] musings. In reality, we the people grow rogue hairs and hold trauma in our frown lines. The city does the same, with not-entirely-erased road alignments dating back to the 1830s and a palimpsest of planning practices leaving Lego-brick hernias on its northern reaches. Each physical moment inscribed upon this valley, each street and intersection, scarred tree and multi-level apartment block are consequences of and have implications for the notion of Canberra as home. Across the city’s many building sites there are hanging screens and signs that project a future imagined and promoted, showrooms and turns of phrase, acquired and appropriated artworks. In front of these visions, trucks roll and crack the pavement laid down decades prior for other times and purposes. Shoots of sour thistle, dandelion and petty spurge are quick to colonise the raw aeolian soil. Canberra’s urban stretch marks have emerged from the swell of tension between exploitation and resistance, the weight of trucks and the vegetation flowering in their wake. This is one way to cut the story. It is a story of competing visions of home here in our odd little city. In this way, it is an age-old story about the politics of the structure in which one closes one’s eyes at night. The theme of this Demos is student activism. Students and young people at large are generally not viewed as actively engaging in or even caring about housing and planning policy in the city. Perhaps this is true. The reason so many students live here in the first place is the choice, made a century ago, to situate Australia’s Capital here. With its assortment of symbolic accruements – of which the Australian National University (ANU) is a well-known one – Canberra draws students from around the world. Many pass through, engaging little in the physical foundations of the city. However, it is not this simple. Those who look out of the windows of tertiary institutions cannot help but wonder at the beauty and mystery of Black Mountain, and those who are able and desire to can experience the pain of running up Mt Ainslie. Ultimately, these are physical and emotional entanglements with place. Of course, there are also those students and young people who have grown up on Ngunnawal and Ngambri Country and have a bodily attachment to this place. So many who have come to this valley have left their mark, and their actions are deeply embedded in the growth and social policies of the Australian Capital Territory. CONVENTION. Tim leans forward in his chair in a Civic café and puts the mug of hot chocolate to his lips. Prior to this meeting, we have only seen him in a grainy black and white newspaper photo in which he is reclining on a plush couch inside the squatted Cambodian Embassy. We’re here to talk about the history of the ACT Squatters’ Union that Tim formed with his friends in the early ‘80s. He starts by bursting our earnest bubble: “We just needed a place to live – that’s why we first started squatting. First of all, we squatted everywhere in the inner north. We did up resources so people knew the right things to say to the police so we weren’t hassled for eight weeks. We got a lot of media. It was the time of the Inquiry into Homelessness in Canberra, and we were the face of it.” The Union had a strong focus on campaigning and broad coalition building. There were influences from youth workers and those involved in the Terrania Creek and Franklin Dam campaigns. Consensus, anti-oppression, local connections and networking, Marxist politics, campaigning via media-friendly actions, a focus on inclusive facilitation formed the basis of the Union. After some time, the Union began to be supported in part by the Builders’ Labourers Federation (BLF) who took it on as a special project. Students were involved from the outset – “We had people who were also students involved of course. I don’t know, they managed to study on the couches of friends. I take my hat off to them”. “Ah, the Embassy squats”, Tim says of the image that brought us to him. “Well I was sleeping on the couch of a friend and a bloke from the foreign office got drunk in the lounge and was talking about a memo he had read about the Cambodian Embassy on Melbourne Avenue being empty, ballroom and all. The next day me and two mates had moved in!” Over the next eight months, over 200 people were housed in the two-story brick residence, one door down from Parliament House. “The cops couldn’t move us on – we had read the Vienna Convention and visited the United Nations office, and the Embassy was outside their jurisdiction!” he laughs. “It was like negotiations between two sovereign entities. We spoke down to the AFP [Australian Federal Police] from the balcony of the Embassy, and it took them a good eight months to figure out that they could use the Convention to their benefit too.” We ask Tim what he felt the Union achieved. He shrugs, “Well, we housed people who needed it”. He gestures around us, up to the metal and glass monoliths of Bunda Street. “These eight hundred thousand dollar apartments here in the city? Well, that’s because of us! They weren’t thinking of having housing here in the city before we were here.” We laugh, but he suddenly turns serious, “Well, they’ve been built, and they’re in a great spot, and when the revolution comes… Well, they’ll make a good place for folk to live”. We are left wondering about the possibility of that hope. UNION. It was a cold winter in ‘83, when the fight for Havelock House commenced. The canvas tents were pitched under the pines on Northbourne, and the bitter winter cold taunted the picket line. At the height of a Canberra housing crisis, one of the city’s larger public servant hostels had just been handed over to the Federal Police and was in the process of being converted into their Headquarters. It was time for action. We’re on the phone – I am seated on a doorstep in the inner north and Peter is in his garden in Oaks Estate, out Queanbeyan way, with a beautiful veggie patch scratched from the hard-packed earth banks of the Molonglo. Peter is a lifelong unionist and he has lived through one of the most volatile parts of Australia’s union history. He gently reminisces, “The Havelock blockade got started by a bunch of young locals supported by the Social Work Union. I was secretary of the Builders’ Labourers Federation and we were working on the new Parliament House at the time. There were a lot of housing access issues in Canberra because of that. That’s the genesis of the picket line.” Canberra’s young folk stood front and centre – youth workers, employment placement workers and union activists. It was the Canberra Youth Refuge who wrote to the Canberra Times. There were protests during Bob Hawke’s visit and his support was sought to stop the closure. By the end of the months-long picket, Havelock House and its future had been discussed in Federal Parliament and a meeting attended by no less than six Ministers was convened by the Unions. Peter puts it into context: “It was a time of the black bans. We called a ban on one of the old houses on Northbourne that was going to be knocked down and turned into flats probably. We also had a four-monthlong picket of the National Library of Australia and two schools, demanding asbestos be removed from the sites. At the time, the unions had a strong focus on broader social issues.” “So we at the BLF supported the picket of Havelock in no uncertain terms. I think there’s still a telegram hanging up there in Havelock House from me to the camp, Stand firm, and you shall prevail. I went down to the frontline many times.” The picket line did indeed hold strong, and a split-off group called ‘Havelock House for the Homeless’ voted to squat the building. Plywood intervened and many were arrested. In the end however, the AFP and the Government gave in to growing pressure. The Inquiry into Homelessness in Canberra commenced soon after and the building was handed over to the newly formed Havelock Housing Association for social housing in 1988. Peter was blacklisted from working in the late 1980s as part of the Federal Government witch hunt against union organisers. One of his jobs following this period was as a handyman for the Havelock Housing Association. He sighs and brings us back to the present. “Well, Havelock is still there because of the collaboration and support between the unions and the community groups. It’s really awful what’s happening now though, with the ACT Government in bed with the developers. They’re shutting down all the social housing places and pushing everyone out into the margins, like they’re meant to be there. It’s appalling.” I look out to the Bruce Ridge bush and think of how much we owe this gentle voice on the other end of the line. MIDNIGHT. In 2010, nearly thirty years after the last tent decamped, the Canberra Student Housing Co-operative was formed. It now occupies one wing of Havelock House. ‘The Co-op’, as it is affectionately known, was formed by a group of students seeking more control of their housing situation, a more affordable rental option in a saturated market and a tighter knit community than what typical student housing offered. One of the founders, Leah, shared these goals when we asked her about the experience of organising in the early days. “We definitely saw it as activism. We would have loved to buy a place but didn’t have any cash or institutional support and it was really just a lucky break with getting in at the right time at Havelock. Starting there gave the Co-op idea some legitimacy, and then once students could actually see it and the fun, inclusive culture it was developing, they could actually get behind it.” It may have been a lucky break with the Havelock Housing Association, but the student connection to the building goes way back. I meet Emma, a current resident in the Co-op, in the bright sun outside Smith’s Alternative in the city. The wind whips in the gulf between the post office and the Melbourne Building, one of the earliest built in the city. Our backs are to the 1920s colonnades. “I’ve lived in ten different places in the last five years. Apart from my childhood house, the Co-op is the closest I’ve gotten to feeling ‘at home’. For me, this space is perpetually in motion. Not that it isn’t peaceful; it’s one of very few places I have been where silence does not cause anxiety… I sit quietly on the back step, watching the Moore St currawongs. Sam G leaves them some mealworms. Workers cruise past on the way home from work; picking up their kids. Bit of pink sky above the fancy blocks across the road—$500/week for a single bed apartment.” Recently, the allocation of social housing to Havelock House has come under pressure again – this time, from inner-city gentrification and the growing demand for the high value land. Other social housing complexes in the area are being demolished and their residents are being moved to the far north of the Territory. Walking past the boarded-up Northbourne Flats in early Spring, Diane, one of the few remaining residents of the social housing block just up from Havelock, hurtles out of her unit. She looks harried but hopeful and, with only a brief introduction (‘Oh! You look like my son!’), goes on to talk of plans being made by a group of residents to secure funding to retain a block of the flats and build a community centre there. People are pushing back again: “Unit 16 faces Northbourne. Those kids wake up to light rail construction and an enormous wall of orange: Geocon’s Midnight Building getting a facelift. Molonglo Group is an ongoing dinner joke and an ongoing threat. Should we buy a two-year internet subscription? What if we’re not here in two years?” The axe may have passed over Havelock for now, but the threat has shifted conversations onto why the Co-op is a community worth maintaining. Collaborations with the ANU have been a focus in recent years, with the Co-op seeking support from the University to purchase or refurbish a building on campus. They’ve campaigned in numerous ways, forming a student political party, approaching the University Council and even hosting the Vice Chancellor for dinner. Unfortunately, most of this has been to little avail. It seems more and more likely that the future of the Co-op will be secured in partnership with the broader housing sector, a sector which past students and young people have played an active role in establishing. PRESENT/FUTURE. Stories drip into tiny rivulets and broader streams which carve the channels of the city’s history. All of us here in Canberra are looking for places to build community and attachment, not just to sleep. We seek to comprehend the small, semi-alpine valley we have come to live in and to assert some control over its future. The story of housing policy in our city is really a story of collaboration between disparate groups and communities – students, informal action groups, unions, formal housing associations – that have taken action against the harsh, isolating reality of developer-driven construction. Canberra is once again in the throes of ‘urban renewal’ and expansion; demolition dust is already in the air. Resistance against the harsh settling of this dust has once again begun.
It is perverse
This floating above Starving kids whose guts and ribs Call for the food that is fed us on plastic tubs With laser cut divots in their centres to catch the Luke warm juice of chicken flesh and eggs cooked together From mass produced chicken slave farms Spinach slops too It is perverse That we concern ourselves with the outer look The plastic wrapped against every cabin item fork toothpick headphone sip of juice But burn the world without thought As though the abstraction makes it all the less real As of course it does It is perverse That men, mostly men, fight Under that banner called freedom by them But yet it is not them that die the most It is those, plastic wrapped kids in the night Shrunken eyes glazing at the shooting star above Holding the floating firmament and not even hoping For a drop of chicken, of manna from that wayward heaven The triangle incised a national symbolism on Ngunnawal Country
overlaying a lived and local landscape with the symbolism of capitol and nation removing all trace of the former to meet the needs of the latter But the ideal feels corrupted, in this need for ground as if really, if all else was equal, capitol could become a hovercraft, supported by its cushion of air overlaying all parts of geography across time and space That capitol sites itself on Ngunnawal land takes away from its essence perhaps of ubiquitousness, of normalcy of the colonial construct that renders capitol necessary Reinstating the locality, the local history and knowledge of this place gives history to Canberra, to Ngambri, to whatever epithets it needs to thrive and be claimed apart from its rendering as symbol Perhaps it's ironic, but fitting, that Skywhale is to Canberra, an odd balloon aloft, buffering and buffeted disconnected from the earth but finally, finally dependent upon it as the warm air brings it back to ground Earlier today, I came across a reference in an article about Lake Mungo, that perennially retold piece of land in western NSW:
In 1968 Jim Bowler, on the advice of Joe Jennings from the Department of Biogeography and Geomorphology at the Australian National University, Canberra, commenced a systematic study of sedimentological evidence for environmental changes which took place in south-eastern Australia during the late Quaternary. For those conversant in the history of work at Mungo, the name of Jim Bowler, or James Maurice Bowler (in accordance with his email epithet), or Jim B. (as his emails are signed), is legendary. Jim was the first to notice 'Mungo Man' and 'Mungo Lady' emerging from that moonscape. But who is Joe Jennings? To archaeologists at least, a name that doesn't exactly ring a bell. A simple Google shows us Joe was prolific and staunch, a foremost authority on geomorphology in Australia (though a Yorkshireman through and through, conservative and harsh). Joe obviously knew the landscape of Australia well enough to suggest to Jim that Lake Mungo and the Willandra was a good place to go for his PhD research. Joe's advice led Jim to lead archaeologists to back up what Indigenous stories have told us all along, that Aboriginal people have been in Australia since the beginning. At the time, it was the earliest cremation and earliest evidence of ritualised burial on the planet. Since then there has been 50 years of research, a huge push for land rights and Indigenous collaboration. Mungo was also Australia's first World Heritage site. Generations of archaeologists have claimed their share of this prize, and there will be plenty to come. It's epic stuff. The flows of history are legion, a multi-braided stream. Who knows if this conversation was say, postponed, or if Joe had died in the war that he served in in Europe, whether the remains at Mungo would ever have entered the scientific imagination of Australian archaeologists and subsequently the national narrative. Surely this conversation is one of the most important in the history of Australian archaeology? With the passing of time, it is easy to forget that these words were passed on actual ground, in this case the old part of the Australian National University, now a series of heritage listed cottages on Liversidge Street in Canberra. The old geomorphology laboratories still stand, unused and decrepit with the ravages of time. They are nothing more than wooden shacks now, tacked onto the back of the squat 1920s building on the front of the block, a piece of lost suburbia enveloped by the concrete and glass of current institutional reputation. Non-descript buildings 101a and 101b. Full of memory and possums. The first time I came across these labs was in 2015 when I was ushering for Ellie Greenwood and Gowrie Varma's place-specific play Atrophy. CityNews tells us that the play was "a complex process supported by a bunch of talented students, Greenwood and Varma have plundered the great works of Sophocles, Euripides and Virgil to create a series of vignettes set in the claustrophobic confines of the labs." We moved from one dimly lit, dusty room to another, soft beams of light searching through the ragged slats, needling through heavy particles to fall upon an actor, lying under the water in an old bathtub. Gasps and dampness. Brooding, intense and lived in. These labs for me forever echo with these poetic snapshots. That Jim and Joe likely had their conversation in the same space, 50 years before, is unsurprising, but reminds us that we shouldn't miss the place-specific nature too of such happenings in the scientific world. History is a creation of individuals, set in the contexts of their own time and bound to their own and extended sense of selves in the world. Joe, in his ANU obituary, seems like a tricky individual, someone loved and hated in equal measure. How much was this tension key to his desire to nurture a young Jim? Pointedly, the obituary suggests that Joe was greatly supported by his 'wife and family', the common refrain for many male academics through time. Silent electors, contributors, typists. And that the conversation happened in Canberra and not in Delegate or Bombala, for instance, comes from a history of colonialism, and federalism. How much did the fact that such musings happened on Ngunnawal land (and not for instance, Walgalu) play a role in the inspiration behind this reckoning? Did the spirits of Country instil this moment? Did the thousands of generations of Elders who cared for them? And what of those behind the establishment of a National University as an Act of Parliament, set apart from pre-existing institutions, those that brought these men to Canberra, to the mountains and the frigid winters, to the dry, windy summers. What role do they play in all of this? Such are the innumerable tiny, waterworn pebbles in the stream-bed that direct a few water molecules here and there, yet en masse flood the world. Perhaps, too, the sound and colour is non-ubiquitous, specific to time and place
An ocean can lap like a dog, and also pop like bubble-wrap in the mangroves Is an ocean defined by sound? When is an ocean an 'ocean'? Does it even make sense to describe an ocean as having sound, to describe an 'ocean's sound'? Or are we rather looking at, and hearing, this collection of water molecules, moving in this particular way, at this particular time? But does it even matter, when the aim of ocean is to condense our emotional response to this external flow and cycle (if indeed it is external, we are without doubt salt and water in motion) to a readily captured and understood sound-symbol Quack in English is Wek in Bahasa Indonesia. Case in point. Can we let the ocean (construct) whisper to us its sound in its own language (construct)? The man is sleeping, in the chair with his bottom lip quivering. His face is haggard, a fighting face, lean and strong. Not peaceful, a sleeping power or danger. A tsunami of moustache! We sit in the shade of colonial trees and you talk
About your Ngunnawal Grandfather and Wiradjuri Grandmother And your connection to Country This place, this park, is up for grabs And you trace your early memories on its lawns and rocks The locals laugh, ridiculous they say Aborigines were never out here this way Real sites have burials and tools they say They’re obvious, clear as day Not our little park, where we played and we laughed And smoked bongs and loved Planted geocaches and such And clothes pegs to find again Things not so obvious to us as we sit here So we cut perfect squares in the earth And sift the soil into conical piles And carefully mark each glass fragment and cigarette butt Evidence, truth, objectivity, we chuckle But you look at these frail wisps of nothing and tears well in your eyes Memories come flooding back of Grandfather Lightning and your horse Poppy And your hard life on the Yass mission, and segregation Who knew the power of a CurlyWurly wrapper? History is told by the victors And we reclaim that space in Canberra In Ngambri, Ngunnawal Country The Country of ancestors and grandchildren We take Occams Razor and we take your mind And together we forge them - a powerful blade That excises a little park as a shared space of memory A place that celebrates the ability to remain In the face of loss, in the face of pain The locals come to hear you now And love the fact their local park, full of memory for them Is made more powerful still by yours And will remain forever protected now Until these colonial trees crumble to dust And this park’s curbs are taken over by sweet grass And a creek cuts back through And Ngunnawal Country Spreads out again from its numerous still beating hearts The woodsmoke tonight, out of a thousand rooftops, amongst the shingles and guttermoss, amongst the shed of lizard skin and the drip of a leftover storm, smells of childhood and smells of home. My smell is sensitive tonight, too sensitive, the late season blossom accosts my nostrils and lays me flat. The softwarm bits of my humanity leak out and drip on the pavement to join with the storm left detritus and mingle with damp leaves. The smells pull me out of myself and emplace me, held by the earth and by bigger processes than I can ever, ever imagine. There is a feeling like my heart turns outward and pulsates in concentric rings into this sunset, like it makes the sunset and the cool air meet and give birth to a new season. Like I am the new season, and I want to give birth. To hold deep, friends and lovers and lie under the cold bright night forever close and ever aware of this beauty.
Sometimes, don't you wish, that there was a key that you could just pick up and put in your ear and unlock the top of your head and point and say
"See! That's what's in there! Just look!" And they all will, and appreciate it, and get it and there will be such wonder in the everyday that all the cracks in the pavement will be golden and rare and there will be a 'pavement crack index' on the Sky Trading segment, where the more cracked and worn a piece of concrete, the more value it holds. And hedge funds will just be that. Clipped topiary that will grow fruit and sloe berries and there will be gin every Sunday afternoon in the warm humid air. big old country, this
struggle land veins cut, spillin blood water ancient cracked skin, dust risin long horizon where spirit lives them spirit being walk at night seepin into the core of everything I want to ride where the salt wind whips my hair and caresses my cheeks. I want to live in a land of peace and calm. Where I belong forever. I want this, yearn for this heartland, soul land. wide old country, this wise like them elders, sittin on it by the fire shrouded in smoke To stand in solidarity, decolonised. Why do I ask to belong in a country that has ripped its heart out through its throat by a powerful new automaton hand? Why should I ask? To learn from the sidelines? But to write history is to struggle. I am (am I?) ready for the fight. stay still silent now, come ere you spoke long quiet time now you listen your white tongue, too thick ours is lean purple, engorged, takes over land and us and you walk together sit behind |