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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781742245621 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | UNSW Press |
| Publication date: | 02/01/2012 |
| Series: | The City Series |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 272 |
| File size: | 880 KB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Melbourne
By Sophie Cunningham
University of New South Wales Press Ltd
Copyright © 2011 Sophie CunninghamAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-74224-562-1
CHAPTER 1
Summer
On 24 January 2009, a group of friends and I visited the Rochford winery in the Yarra Valley (an hour or so out of Melbourne) to hear the legendary Canadian musician Leonard Cohen sing. Australian singer-songwriter Paul Kelly was Cohen's main support act. That day in the Yarra Valley seems more golden in retrospect: twelve days later, fires destroyed more than 4500 square kilometres in north-eastern Victoria. The next concert Rochford hosted was a bushfire benefit – but that was six weeks away.
As I stood with Virginia and looked around the crowd, I saw the faces of many people I'd met in my 45 years: former housemates, current friends, my publisher, ex-lovers, friends of friends, authors I'd worked with, a guy who'd designed the cover of a book I'd once published, the woman who ran my favourite deli stall at Queen Victoria Market, my osteopath. These people create my version of Melbourne: those looped connections that start in kindergarten, school and university and are refined by where you live and the work you do. In Melbourne the environment contributes to this. Built on a plain, endlessly flat, the city has an appeal that is subtle, while the climate – usually too hot or too cold – is not. (Well, except in autumn. In autumn Melbourne is perfect.) We're turned indoors, towards people. Writer George Johnston said of the place that 'A powerful tide of human dilemma runs beneath the skin of everything'. There's truth to this.
During 2009 I was reading a draft of Paul Kelly's then unpublished memoir, How to Make Gravy. A passage from it particularly struck me:
More and more, my friends and loved ones seem like heroes to me. With them I've shared victories and defeats. Some have risen, some have moved on, some have broken down. We've lost a lot of things along the way. But through it all we've helped each other out – dealing with the illness and death of parents and friends, raising children, looking for love, trying to find good work.
Maybe it is as simple, as complicated, as that: relationships are what make a city.
A week or so before that concert, I'd driven to Yea to do a reading at their library. It's not a long drive, just under two hours if you head northeast of Melbourne, even if you take the pretty, longer route through Eltham, Christmas Hills and Kinglake as I did. Suburbs and country blur in the hinterland – something Melbourne's controversial 2030 planning policy was attempting to manage, with its focus on avoiding inappropriate rural residential development. Eltham is definitely a suburb, but at some indefinable point on the windy Eltham-Yarra Glen Road you slip down into Yarra Glen and you're officially in the Yarra Valley. The road that hugs the eastern side of Kinglake National Park is lined with prehistoric-looking tree ferns and soaring messmate stringybark. Their beauty means you barely resent the large trucks you're inevitably stuck behind on the hilly, single-lane road. Driving slowly allows you to enjoy the view.
I arrived in Yea early enough to have a counter tea with my mum, stepfather and some other locals. We sat around drinking cold beer and talking about the heat. The reading was lively and well attended, and the librarian, Jan Smith, welcomed us warmly. The evening had a personal feeling you don't often find in the city.
A few weeks later, on Saturday 7 February, the temperature rose to 47 degrees Celsius in our street. I tried to fry an egg in the sun but I mistakenly used an aluminium pizza tray, so my attempt to dramatise our plight in an amusing and symbolic way resulted in nothing more than a faint bubble of egg white and a slow hardening of yolk. I uploaded the photos of my failure to photo-sharing website Flickr in an attempt to stay jaunty. But as the temperature rose, so did feelings of anxiety and panic.
That day, which came to be known as Black Saturday, capped off two weeks of above 30- and often above 40-degree temperatures. In the hot weeks of build-up, railway lines buckled, overloaded buses broke down and the then Minister for Transport, Lynne Kosky, looked defensive as she talked of the passing decades and lack of appropriate maintenance under previous governments. It would seem, when all the statistics were done and dusted, that some 374 people died during the heatwave in the last week of January 2009 alone. That's more than twice the number who died in the fires that were to come.
The Cape Lilac tree in our courtyard had a lush green coverage of leaves – it had been planted especially to shade the house in summer and then, when the leaves dropped, let the light in during winter. Usually it made a difference to the temperature in the house, but some leafy shade wasn't going to cut it that Saturday. Over in the Carlton Gardens, possums fell, dead, out of trees. Virginia and I listened as the possum that lived in our roof shuffled about restlessly, trying to relieve its distress. Birds dropped out of the sky.
Birds had also fallen on the wing during the heatwave of 1939. The fires that erupted then resulted in the loss of 2 million hectares of land and seventy-one lives. Despite what had been a century of living through hot summers, people back then sweltered through the heatwave in heavy suits and drank whiskey in dark, overheated pubs. These days we wear light cotton and drink cold beer, but it isn't much compensation for the original layout of the city or the failure of its old-style buildings to effectively fend off rising temperatures.
While the heatwave of January and early February 2009 was the hottest in Melbourne's recorded history, the conditions weren't totally dissimilar to those experienced by early European explorers. When Lieutenant Colonel David Collins arrived at what he called Sullivan Bay (near what's now Sorrento) in 1803, the temperatures were in the mid-forties and he and his party could not find water. Indeed water – the search for it, the corralling of it, the excess of it, the squandering of it, now the lack of it – is a defining motif in Melbourne's history. As was a refusal to build a city that in any way responded to the climate. According to architect and author of The Australian Ugliness Robin Boyd, builders and developers in Victoria were
oblivious to all lessons on the Australian climate learnt by the older men in New South Wales. In Port Phillip Bay the new settlers found a climate milder than any yet encountered on the new continent. The winter was grey, damp and depressing, but not uncomfortably cold for long periods; never cold enough to take leaves for more than three months from the English trees which they hastily planted ... Despite the lesson of the Old Colonials, verandas were not considered necessary.
The terrace houses favoured by the boom-era population of the mid-to-late 19th century – a style of house we live in – keep heat at bay for several days, then effectively turn into ovens.
So, we sat in our oven and tried to keep tabs on friends. Cathy, a new friend who'd recently moved to Melbourne from Sydney, went out early to get supplies and then shut herself in her flat with the blind down and wondered to what hell she'd moved. Mike and Ciannon, who live in North Fitzroy, painstakingly covered all the windows of their apartment with cardboard and foil. Susannah and Tom escaped to Aireys Inlet, down the Great Ocean Road, where it was some 15 degrees cooler. Over in Braybrook, Jeff was putting his chickens in the shower cubicle and watering them on a regular basis. I didn't speak to Sian, who lives in St Kilda, but a couple of nights earlier we'd joined her at Elwood Beach, where the temperature at 8 pm was a mere 28 degrees – only to watch, with heavy hearts, the temperature gauge rise 10 degrees as we drove home around midnight. The worms in our worm farm turned into a mass of goo. Our friend Lizzie found her ballroom dancing shoes melted in the back of her car.
Bird, our small Burmese cat who'd been vomiting in the heat, disappeared around midday. Going outside to look for her was like walking into a furnace. Fitzroy is full of old stone terrace houses and high brick walls. In the centre of it, where we live, there are barely any gardens, and only our Cape Lilac and the old gum tree in the yard of the gallery across the road provide any shade or greenery. After two weeks of heat the walls were almost too hot to touch, and the thought of Bird's little pads on the asphalt made me frantic. I scoured the suburb, looking for shady spots she might have hidden in. I even looked in the cellar of the Standard Hotel, the pub a few doors up from us, which she could slip into from the street if she wanted. The barman heard me calling her and directed me out to a tree in the beer garden where she'd dug herself a nest of dirt and was looking quite cool.
The day staggered on. There were phone calls among friends to calm each other; there was chatter online. People photographed the temperature registered on the iconic Nylex clock that sits above the Cremorne silos on Punt Road – 45! 46! – and posted them to social networking sites as proof of suffering.
Virginia and I tried to steel ourselves for the outdoor wedding we were attending at the Melbourne Zoo later that afternoon – about an hour and a half before a cool change was expected. The Melbourne Zoo is Australia's oldest. It opened in 1862, displaying animals that had previously been on public view first at the Royal Botanic Gardens and then at 'Richmond Paddocks' along the Yarra River opposite the gardens. Apparently they'd moved the animals to the current location of Royal Park because they were getting too damp. They wouldn't have minded being damp on that Saturday. None of us would've.
Getting to the wedding was an endurance test in itself. By the time we arrived, my heart was racing, my face was bright red and I was drenched in sweat. I had trouble breathing. We walked from the car park to the large Moreton Bay fig where the ceremony was to take place and I almost fainted. I wasn't the only one. The half-hour or so until the ceremony is a bit of a blur but finally the bride, Keren – who had clearly been kept in a fridge for the day – stepped under the tree, looking cool and elegant. You could see her beautiful pale skin register the shock of the heat as she slowly changed colour over the next few minutes. A temperature drop of 15 degrees around 5 pm saved her. In a Brontë-esque flourish, the bride's and groom's vows had to be shouted above the wild winds that accompanied the change. This was the gale-force south-westerly that caused the long eastern flanks of the fires that had sprung up during the day to join into massive fire fronts.
After the ceremony and before the reception, Virginia and I took advantage of the more comfortable temperature and went for a walk. The zoo animals were still in recovery, as were we all. The lions were lying on their backs, paws in the air, sprinklers cooling them. The boys' manes ran all the way down their backs and in a tufted line up the middle of their bellies. They looked as shell-shocked as the humans. We walked past meerkats lying flat as pancakes – not a perky sentinel among them.
It wasn't until we got home at midnight that we heard that firestorms had devastated Kinglake, Narbethong, Flowerdale, Marysville and many other Victorian towns. All told, more than 2000 homes were destroyed and 173 people died. No one living in Melbourne was unaffected. For days afterwards people walked around on the verge of tears, stunned. The fires would blaze for several more weeks, keeping a pall of smoke over the city.
Author Peter Temple was finishing his novel Truth (which went on to win the 2010 Miles Franklin Literary Award) at the time, and the violent drama of Black Saturday floats through the book like smoke:
The fire would come as it came to Marysville and Kinglake on that February hell day, come with the terrible thunder of a million hooves, come rolling, flowing, as high as a twenty-storey building, throwing red-hot spears and fireballs hundreds of metres ahead, sucking air from trees, houses, people, animals, sucking air out of everything in the landscape, creating its own howling wind, getting hotter and hotter, a huge blacksmith's reducing fire that melted humans and animals, detonated buildings, turned soft metals to silver flowing liquids and buckled steel.
My stepfather was a teacher at Yea High School. Many of the students from the school had lived in Kinglake, where the fires were at their worst. Some had died. He'd had to – everyone had had to – read in the paper the details of these teenagers' final minutes. Jan Smith, Yea's librarian, turned up on television. She was helping support the displaced people in the tent city that had sprung up in the centre of town.
Almost everyone knew someone who'd lost land, or life, or were worried for areas that had held the fires at bay and might still go up. Densely treed rural suburbs, like Eltham, only 20 kilometres from the centre of the city, were on high alert for weeks, which caused those residents great stress. People repeated their own, and others', stories over and over. One of these struck me as particularly apocalyptic: a young man sitting in his backyard in Lilydale watched the fires engulf the area while surrounded by possums, snakes and other wildlife – all seeking refuge.
The media's intense telling and retelling of people's experiences of survival, or of their deaths, became difficult to bear. It was only when researching this book that I realised this relentless going-over of details is a relatively recent thing. Only two days after one of Melbourne's most significant tragedies, the West Gate Bridge disaster of 1970, the horror of what happened when an entire span of the unfinished bridge collapsed had been delegated to page 15. This wasn't because people didn't care: they did, they do, it's an event that haunts the city still. It's just that the culture in which an endless poring over of people's grief, an almost ghoulish fascination with how they 'felt', was not yet the norm in the mainstream media.
It was not long before the distress felt by some victims of the fire shifted to blame – much of it directed at local council policies that had attempted to restrict the amount of clearing allowed on individual blocks of land. There were questions, also, as to whether enough controlled burning had been undertaken in an attempt to cut down on tree litter that acts as fuel for fire. This argument has been had in Melbourne (indeed Australia) since the days of first white settlement. Melbourne is a city that spreads ever outwards. It bleeds into rural areas, following the upper reaches of the Yarra River, the broad arc of Port Phillip Bay. The question of whether we should insist on our 'right' to live in these hybrid habitats has never been adequately resolved.
David Nichols was a neighbour of mine when I was a kid and is now a lecturer in Urban Planning at the University of Melbourne. Twelve days after Black Saturday, he wrote in The Age:
Perhaps we should consider the example of the Gippsland town of Noojee, by all accounts a delightful village in the early 20th century; all but two houses were destroyed there in a ferocious bushfire in the summer of 1926. Within six months, the determined people of Noojee had returned and, with the assistance of well-wishers and supporters, reconstructed a large part of the built fabric of their community. New shops were built and the post office and the railway station were replaced. Trees that were thought to have been killed in the fires grew new leaves, the wattle bloomed again and the birds returned to the Latrobe Valley. Optimism thrived among the town's inhabitants, as they sought to gain funds for new roads to open up the area for agriculture. This delightful outlook was shattered 13 years later in the devastating 1939 bushfires that wiped Noojee out a second time.
They went on to build yet again.
A few days after Black Saturday, drama of a different kind began to impact upon Melburnians in a symbolic but real way. As a result of the global financial crisis Nylex went into receivership and the lights on the Punt Road clock went out. You may know the clock from Paul Kelly's song 'Leaps and Bounds': 'I'm high on the hill, / looking over the bridge / to the MCG / And way up on high / the clock on the silo / says eleven degrees'. Some twenty years after that was written, shifts in Melbourne's weather had already meant that the clock on the silo was rarely reading 11 degrees and long-sleeved footy jumpers were looking increasingly old fashioned. For the lights to go off altogether seemed more ominous still.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Melbourne by Sophie Cunningham. Copyright © 2011 Sophie Cunningham. Excerpted by permission of University of New South Wales Press Ltd.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Foreword,Summer,
Autumn,
Winter,
Spring,
Summer, again,
Afterword,
Bibliography,
Acknowledgments,