The Old Bill as art critic

“…miles and miles of hoardings hiding the ugly hole in the ground that is the start of the North East Link…” Greensborough Rd, May, 2024. (McLachlan)

You’ve got to feel something for the persecution poor old William Posters has suffered from the Old Bill. He’s been copping it from the coppers for years, the words “Bill Posters Prosecuted” once upon a time a familiar sight on awnings and placards across the city. You can still see a bit of this, usually on building sites, but the lack of any meaningful bill posting lately along those miles and miles of hoardings hiding the ugly hole in the ground that is the start of the North East Link, has me thinking. If the sight of paper posters peeling in public places isn’t a thing in these days of the internet and social media – then what has replaced it?

The canvas and timber Salle de Valentino dance hall on the corner of Bourke and Spring Streets, Melbourne. It was a popular venue in the early gold rushes but by the 1860s when this picture was taken, had closed, it’s walls becoming billboards for billposting. (Source: State Library of Victoria)

Once upon a time, billposting was a pretty common sight all over our fair town. Billposting billposters battled with each other to cover every available vertical surface, jousting with long paste brushes on muddy Melbourne streets like knights on the Field of the Cloth of Gold. In the eyes of these bill posters, any wall surface that wouldn’t hold a poster was simply a waste of space. The posting of bills was used to promote anything and everything. From cure-alls to boot blacking and election candidates to circus clowns. Sometimes, it was hard to tell the difference.

The old Lower Plenty Rd bridge, c1928. Note the bill board placed in a prominent location at the turn of the road crossing the bridge..

Even out here at the Plenty Bridge, in what were the early years of the motor age at a time when Yallambie and the surrounding district was still considered to be, “a bit out in the country”, a large billboard was put up at the turn of the old road where it crossed over the River. At Heidelberg, along the post and rail fencing that lined the upper reaches of Burgundy Street, advertisers dispensed with the idea of billboards altogether and simply scrawled their messages onto the fence railing itself.

Burgundy St, Heidelberg, c1890. Note the tobacco advertiser’s scrawl on the fence rails. (Source: photograph by W H Ferguson, State Library of Victoria picture).

The process of writing messages onto public spaces was nothing new. The expression “graffiti” is derived from an ancient Greek word which means “to write”, so it is something that been around a long time. In fact, humans have been making marks on walls since a time before there were humans. Some prehistoric cave art has been attributed to our vanished Neanderthal cousins, although what they could possibly have been recording back then must forever remain a mystery. I’m guessing something like, “Zog has bad teeth”, “the Mammoth Boys can go suck dinosaur eggs” or the inevitable “Loana is hot” – which must have been an especially important thing to note back in the Ice Ages. Although these marks may be a form of ancient graffiti, to the modern observer they are something else – something we now call cave art.

Proper cave art at the famed Chauvet Cave in southern France.

Proper cave art may have had a religious significance to the caveman, but by historical times the idea of scribbling on walls was everywhere. Any fan of history will remember the bawdy graffiti of Pompeii and Herculaneum, and any fan of Monty Python will remember Brian painting “Romans go home” in 10-foot-high letters of appalling Latin grammar onto the walls of Herod’s palace. Here in 19^th Century Victoria, early tourists left their own small marks on the Sisters’ Rocks outside Stawell, but these days those marks have spread like a contagion into London double decker bus sized lettering, splashed all about in lurid colours. The Northern Grampians Shire council has said it has no plans to remove the graffiti at the Sisters’, instead noting its tourism potential, but here’s the point.

The Sisters’ Rocks near Stawell as portrayed on a piece of vintage souvenir ware pottery. Note the marks of grafitti shown on the rock surfaces. (Private collection)

The thing about graffiti is that it tends to attract more of the same, and more so the longer it goes without removal. I can almost tell you when this started in Melbourne properly. When I was a kid, there was an American situation comedy television series set in New York. It arrived on Australian TV screens soon after people started installing colour reception into their homes, the opening titles showing New York subway trains painted in lurid graffiti. I remember the boys at school discussing the show, not because of its dubious comedy potential but because of that scene in the credits depicting trains travelling about in Brooklyn. “Did you see those painted trains? Nobody ever cleans them.” Soon after this we started seeing Melbourne’s trains painted in similar style and for a long while, nobody seemed to clean them either.

By the early 2000s graffiti, especially around Melbourne’s newly privatised public transport system, had become an epidemic. Graffiti artists routinely held onto the back of moving trains to spray paint the carriages turning them into moving billboards, always keeping one step ahead of the authorities who regarded this as commonplace vandalism.

Hosier Lane in Melboure. (McLachlan)

These days Melbourne’s trains are kept more or less graffiti free but take a step down any inner-city street or past a railway easment and you’ll see that as a form of artistic expression within the systems of the broader structures of the city, it is an art medium that hasn’t gone away. In some places like Smith Street, Collingwood the authorities seem to have given up altogether trying to keep graffiti under any sort of control. The result is that a fine Victorian streetscape has been ruined by a scrawl of stupid spray-painted tagging, randomly splashed without any thought across every available surface and without any pretence that what we are seeing could be considered a form of artistic expression. In other places like Hosier Lane in Melbourne however, the work of graffiti artists is actively encouraged, even supported, and deserves the other name that many people give it – street art. Tourists come from near and far to see an artform that in this situation has entered the cultural mainstream. Art as they say, is in the eye of the beholder.

“…an ephemeral media, created in a public space and more often than not, without official permission.” Graffiti seen in the back streets of Thornbury, March 2023. (McLachlan)

Street art is by it’s nature an ephemeral media, created in a public space and more often than not, without official permission. While a Banksy mural can be praised, prised off the wall and sold to a gallery for millions, other street art goes either unnoticed, is painted over or left to weather in the elements. All the same, no matter how appealing individual street art might be, it seems to me that there’s always going to be some knuckle head who will come along later and scrawl a “tag” across it.

What sound does a cat make? Graffiti on the side wall of the Yallambie milk bar/general store.

At the Yallambie milk bar and general store, the side wall facing the electrical easement has for a long time carried a rather cute painting of a kitten. I couldn’t tell you when this graffiti in particular went up, but it does carry the moniker “Meow” which it seems was once a well-known name on the Melbourne graffiti scene. It’s a bit faded now but the fact that it’s there at all has meant other, less creative tagging has inevitably followed Meow.

“Meow” signature.

The separation between art and vandalism remains a subject largely still open to debate, but in some instances there has never been room for an argument. Late last year a red swastika appeared on a Council owned, Yallambie footpath. The symbol is of course an offence to display under the laws of this state, and offensive under the thinking of any right-minded individual. The police soon ensured its removal, but the question remains, just how many police resources should we devote to getting down on graffiti and when? Last week The Age newspaper carried a story under a headline “the crew that took police 20 years to crack” which told the tale of a 20-year-old fight to bring one member of a train painting graffiti gang of the early 2000s, the 70K gang, to justice. This particular graffiti artist had been living abroad for decades, beyond the reach of the long arm of the law. When he finally returned to Australia in order to visit a sick family member, he found the Old Bill waiting at the airport to greet him.

Police said that Scott-Howarth and the 70K crew were prolific vandals between 2001 and 2005. Scott-Howarth took massive risks to paint prominent infrastructure – trains and other public property – alongside fellow crew members ‘‘ Bonez’’ , ‘‘ Bald’’ , ‘‘ Karl’’ , ‘‘ Renks’ ’ and ‘‘ Meow’’ , whose work endures throughout Melbourne decades later. (The Age, 24 May, 2024)

The debate over what constitutes graffiti art and what constitutes graffiti vandalism will go on, especially since inside every one of us there’s an art critic just wanting to have a say. “I don’t know what art is, but I know what I like.” How often have we heard this? “Bill Posters” might be forgotten, his place now occupied by this thing they call graffiti art, but think again if you expect the Old Bill to be a sympathetic exhibition critic.

Graffiti artists and graffiti vandals will continue doing what they do, and the police will continue to chase them, which is what they do. Perhaps it’s the very illegality that makes this sort of thing a proper artform in the eyes of so many people. It’s an artform that these days is demanding of recognition, but when it gets that recognition, will it still be art?

Wall painting marking the end of a lane way off Flinders Lane, Melbourne, May, 2024. (McLachlan)

Malus domestica

Nothing quite beats an apple does it? And I’m not talking about that device in the palm of your hand that you are possibly reading this on right now. I mean that most widely planted and regularly consumed fruit of all, Malus domestica – the apple.

I remember a time from my childhood when my sister and I planted two trees grown from pips at the back of our house in Rosanna, the relic from some long forgotten lunch. One tree for her, one tree for me in a typical exercise in sibling rivalry.  Mine always looked a bit stunted of course which she took care to point out. Apples grown from seed tend to be very different from those of their parent tree so it was a matter of chance what type of fruit these trees eventually produced, but they supplied fruit consistently which my mother baked into apple pies to follow the Sunday roast.

Oh, the memories of an apple pie childhood.

Granny Smith in full bloom, September, 2016.

Today we keep a little pocket orchard in the garden here and this includes several cultivar apples – “Yates”, “Jonathan”, the English classic “Cox’s Orange Pippin” and perhaps that most famous apple tree of them all, the ubiquitous Granny Smith.

Granny Smith blossom about to open this month.

“Granny” Smith photographed before 1870.

The Granny Smith is an Australian apple type reputedly first grown by “Granny” Maria Ann Smith in Sydney in 1868 when, after throwing an apple core out of her kitchen window one day, she afterwards discovered a seedling growing in the garden mulch, the first of the new variety. Today Granny Smith’s apple is one of the most popular in the world which just goes to show how clever your old granny can be.

The remains of Thomas Wragge’s orchard in Yallambie Park, October, 2022.

The domesticated origins of the apple are believed to have occurred in Central Asia about 6000 years ago and today it is conservatively estimated that there are over 7000 varieties of apple growing world-wide. In this area the Heidelberg and Greensborough districts in Melbourne’s north were an early and well-regarded fruit growing region that is before we allowed it to all get covered over with houses. In a repeated statement made about Yallambie’s Thomas Wragge, it has often been said of Wragge that he was the first orchardist of the district, although this was surely likely to have more true of his predecessors, the brothers John and Robert Bakewell.

Blossom this year on the Wragge apple.

“…groves of massive fig trees of various kinds, rich with their luscious autumn gifts; rows of graceful olives, laden with fruit. Mulberry, peach, and all common orchard trees, in luxuriant abundance;” (Louisa Anne Meredith, writing about the Bakewell garden at Yallambee in 1856)

Up to 20 new seedling gums have been recently planted across the river flat in a move that in few years is destined to change the open character of the meadow.

Wragge pear trees in bloom.

The Wragge apple is actually regrowth from the old root stock after Council sprayed the tree with herbicide in a misguided attempt at weed control about 25 years ago.

To this day on the river flats in Yallambie Park there remain a few neglected and worn out fruit trees from old man Wragge’s once extensive orchards, which incidentally the recent planting of a potential forest of seedling gums across the meadow by the Council in my view will do nothing to enhance. The solitary apple in this grove is a sad sight but the pears still produce enough fruit to make an occasional pear tart, something I can state from experience. Elsewhere in the City of Banyule though, orchard elements within river landscape settings survive and are comparatively well maintained, with those from the 19^th Century of Mark Sill and Peter Fanning at Warringal Park particularly noteworthy. Fanning was a prominent tenant farmer on Hawdon’s Banyule estate and later designed the Heidelberg Gardens while employed by the Shire Council. The struggles Fanning endured as an orchardist and farmer are well documented and were recorded by Hawdon’s agent and later owner of Banyule, James Graham. With the recent flooding that has occurred all along the Plenty and Yarra Rivers this month I wonder how those trees are doing right now.

Plenty River in flood at Yallambie, looking upstream c1891. (Source: Bill Bush Collection)

Another flood photographed this month from about the same location.

Flood waters in front of the remnant Yallambie orchard and reaching across the site of Harry Ferne’s old house.

Oak tree tree avenue at Sills Bend, Warringal Parklands, January, 2022.

Pears planted by Mark Sill and still fruiting in the Warringal Parklands, Heidelberg last January.

“…the great damage has been in the bend, where those beautiful fruit trees that Fanning was so proud of and used to take everyone to look at, are lying all on the ground covered with logs and debris of every description brought down by the flood… Some of the farmers higher up the river and on the Plenty have suffered serious loss…” Letter from James Graham to Joseph Hawdon, 20 October, 1863

And this:

“Fanning in a boat sailed over the highest mulberry tree in the garden.” Letter from James Graham to Joseph Hawdon, 22 December, 1863

Looking out from here last week it wasn’t Fanning in his boat I was expecting, more Noah in his Ark.

Batman’s c1841 apple tree and old Maroondah Aquaduct pipe bridge near the corner of Corowa Cr and Lear Ct, Greensborough, March 2015.

Up river from Yallambie at Greensborough, Charles Partington and the pioneer horticulturalist Robert Whatmough also kept orchard trees and of these there survives still one remarkable specimen on a small river flat at Flintoff’s Point Lookout, adjacent to the old Maroondah aqueduct pipe bridge. This tree, the so called “Batman Apple” was supposedly planted by Whatmough for the early settler Frederick Flintoff in 1841. According to legend the tree had been sourced from John Batman’s garden after earlier having been brought to Port Phillip by Batman from Van Diemen’s Land. This would almost certainly make the tree the oldest fruit tree in Victoria or, to put this another way, “As old as Adam.”

“Batman Apple Tree” at Greensborough from “The Leader” newspaper April, 1910. (Picture by R G Brown, Museum Victoria Collections).

According to Abrahamic tradition, the progenitors of humanity, Adam and Eve got into a bit of strife after listening to the machinations of a talking snake. It’s a well-known story from the early pages of the world’s most widely read book in which Eve takes fruit from the “Tree of Knowledge” and gives it to her partner Adam to sharpen his teeth on, resulting in Paradise Lost, a very long poem and it must be said, a very silly name for the male larynx.

Adam and Eve in Paradise by Lucas Cranach, the Elder, 1533. (Source: Wikipedia)

In Western Christian Art the fruit of this Tree is usually shown to be an apple, a forbidden fruit the eating of which was said to have delivered sin into the world. The depiction of sin as an apple has intrigued grey haired scholars for generations but it is likely to have been nothing more than an early translator’s pun. In Latin the word mālum meaning apple caused mălum, meaning evil. Funny I guess if you’re a hair shirted monk living in the Dark Ages, tasked with copying endless religious texts by candlelight with only your own celibacy to think about.

In spite of this, there’s really no such thing as a bad apple it must be said. Even the bad bits can be cut out when you’re eating one, which is an interesting thought if used as a metaphor for life because when all is said and done, the only thing worse than finding a worm in your apple after you’ve taken your bite, is finding half a worm.

The art of listening

They say that silence is golden and that sometimes it’s better to listen than to be heard.

In Yallambie Park last October there appeared one morning a couple of open faced, Perspex triangular boxes the mysterious purpose of which was not immediately apparent to the cursory glance. What were they for? Had they been beamed down overnight by a visiting alien space ship in lieu of the usual crop rings on the grass? I do recall seeing something similar as a central, unresolvable enigma in Stanley Kubrick’s, 2001: A Space Odyssey. In that landmark spaceship flick, a big, black monolith is tasked by aliens with the job of waking mankind up to itself.

“Stop, listen,” art in Yallambie Park, February, 2022.

That film was made over 50 years ago but in some ways, the thingamajigs in Yallambie Park might be closer in inspiration to Kubrick’s monolith than you may possibly think at first. The Yallambie boxes are part of a temporary community art installation in the park titled, “Stop, Listen” by Vincent Giles and Alice Bennett. The boxes have appeared at two parkside locations in the City of Banyule – one at Yallambie Park and the other near Warringal Park over in Heidelberg. The sites were chosen by the artists themselves as having local appeal and providing the potential of acoustically rich environments for avifauna and pedestrian traffic. The big idea is to stand inside one of these boxes, to face out towards the surrounding area and to stop and listen to everything around you. You see, most of us never stop long enough to appreciate the world around us and these structures, in spite of their wonky build and temporary star picket post quality, work surprisingly well acoustically. I’ve stood inside them on several occasions since Christmas and listened to the change of sounds the horn like structure of their form creates.

Art lover on the Main Yarra Trail, Heidelberg, February, 2022.

The Stop, Listen artists were paid $6000 for this project after securing a grant under Banyule Council’s annual Arts & Culture Project Grants scheme last year. The concept, location and installation of the art was developed and managed by the artists themselves. The money spent might seem over generous to some or tight fisted to others, but what price art? I don’t really know. Art, as they say, means different things to all who experience it. When I was down in Warringal Park on the weekend to look at the other Stop, Listen installation located there, the dog walkers were out in force and as I observed, dogs too can show their appreciation of art. Isn’t there a certain, Marcel Duchamp “Art of the Readymade” in every fire hydrant seen by a little dog?

“Stop, listen,” art north of Warringal Park, Heidelberg, February, 2022.

When I was at art school and learning the tricks of the trade in graphic design, I remember being introduced to contemporary art by way of a foam cup glued to a piece of black painted cardboard. The price tag at that time was half the cost of a small house, but it was art, or so they told me. A Styrofoam cup can be elevated to the dignity of a work of art simply by the artist’s act of choice. Art can be as simple as that.

It’s a fact that art and the performing arts have always had a raw deal in Australia and two years of pandemic have seen them pushed continually last on the handouts list. Personally, I’d like to see more of our dollars spent on the arts and less on roads and war machines, for it is my belief that it is from art that the worth of any civilization can be measured. Art in all its forms is all around us in every aspect of our daily lives and we would know this if only we could see it as such. If we could recognize its intrinsic value, the world might be a very different place. In one of my early posts I made comment about a POW of the Japanese who, observing the penchant for art in his captors, came to realize them not as barbarians but as fellow human creatures. From the transitory nature of simple installations like Stop, Listen we can come to understand the nature of art and the natural art in our nature.

Secret Agent 86 and The Chief meet inside the infamous “Cone of Silence”.

Those who recall repeats of the old American spy spoof comedy, “Get Smart” will remember the acoustic problems Secret Agent 86 and The Chief found when using their “Cone of Silence.” It was a running gag, the purpose of which was supposed to enable secret conversations inside. The reality however was that use of the cone inevitably made conversation inside impossible while easy for those outside to overhear. How many of the world’s problem could have been solved before they started if there had been no secrets and instead transparency in all things? When the President of the Russian Federation says, “We have no plans to invade Ukraine,” does he mean the tanks are on their way? When a Chinese frigate sailing in Australian economic zone waters shines a military grade laser at RAAF aircraft, what do we read into this message? Are these things even happening or has the rhetoric of propaganda distorted the facts to our hearing? Maybe it’s time to sit down and talk things through before they go any further. In any situation other than the vacuum of space, sound is an ever present medium but using it to communicate properly is as much a gift of our civilization as the use of our opposable thumbs. It’s getting a balance and a perspective across cultural barriers that has always been the problem.

A line of scripture pasted inside the artwork in Yallambie Park.

While looking at the Yallambie Stop, Listen cones I noticed that someone has pasted a line of scripture, probably by way of ministry but in the very act itself, also creating art in a way. The line was 6:33 from Matthew’s Gospel but personally I like the line that follows, “Do not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself.” Matt 6:34

When first seen by the monkeys, Kubrick’s Monolith was silent. It erupted into a cacophony of alien sound only at the touch of that first monkey hand but the sounds soon had all the monkeys jumping up and down, walking upright and waging war upon their neighbours. Silence can be golden. All we need to do is to dump the rhetoric, get a bit of perspective and listen.

Tyger Tyger

It might seem to some people living abroad that Australia is a scary place, a land chock-a-block filled with dangerous animals, and that’s not just the ones we let loose on Canberra. There are lots of things that bite and sting in this country and of course, even in the broad coastal waters that surround it. It’s part of the natural order of the physical world with all the biodiversity and variety of life and habitat which that entails. Steve Irwin made a successful career out of promoting this to the world, wrestling crocodiles for entertainment until taking it all a little too far one day, he booked himself in for that final curtain call from which in this life there is no encore.

Sign on the Plenty River below Montmorency Park.

Everybody who has heard the song knows of the dangers of finding a Redback spider on a toilet seat at night and mention has been made before about the possibility of finding snakes in the vicinity of a river landscape. Snakes are a particular concern in this area with many homes in Yallambie located in proximity to the Plenty River and seldom a summer goes by when we do not see a snake here or at least hear of one nearby.

Tiger snake scientific illustration.

The Tiger Snake, (Notechis scutatus) is the snake most commonly found in the City of Banyule. It is a highly venomous species which is found throughout the southern regions of Australia, striped like a tiger olive and brown with seasonal variations occurring in colour. Tigers produce 20 or 30 live young in summer after mating in the spring. We had a Tiger in our rose garden last year and the year before we found one on the front door step at night, but usually the sight of birds lining up in the branches and going crook at something on the ground during the daylight hours is warning enough that there might be a snake about.

Tigers are also notably good climbers and last week with the birds squawking suspiciously at the back of the house again, my wife discovered a large one poking its head out of the hollow in our back oak tree. There is a hole just above head height in this tree below the bee hive and she said she looked up because she had an uncanny feeling that something was watching her. By the time I got out there our Tiger was on the move, apparently intending to settle inside a nest of the large elkhorn fern I had tied into position only the day before. I came armed with a phone camera in one hand and an axe in the other but, remembering that most people get bitten when trying to kill or frighten a snake and also that the species is in actual fact protected in this State, I chose the camera.

Tiger snake in the back oak tree at Yallambie, January, 2022. (McLachlan)

So there it is, taken from a small distance while remaining out of harm’s way. Frightening isn’t it? But at the same time strangely beautiful.

Tyger Tyger, burning bright,
In the forests of the night

Copy A of William Blake’s original printing of The Tyger, 1794. (Source: British Museum via Wikipedia)

Tiger on the move on the Plenty River Trail, Montmorency, January, 2022. (Source: Jack Charles, via Monty Life 3094 FB Group)

Usually, if given half a chance, a snake will keep its own counsel and so after I had made a bit of noise around the tree, this particular Tiger was encouraged to be on its way to a destination unknown. Dear reader, maybe it’s in your own Yallambie garden right now? There are certainly a few snakes around this January. Later that same day this video was posted on a Montmorency FB group page, the location reportedly near the Lower Plenty football ground on the Montmorency side of the River.

The Tiger is said to be one of the most poisonous snakes in the world and with its wide distribution, before the development of antivenins, the species was responsible for regular fatalities. Untreated, death in humans will occur in about half of all Tiger snake bites. On average maybe two people still die each year in Australia from Tiger snake bite, usually in places where access to medical aid is not readily available.

Instructions from 50 year old Melbourne made snakebite lancet kit.

The danger of snake attack must have taken a little getting used to in colonial Australia, especially for Irish settlers coming from a country where there are famously no snakes. In the early years of the 19^th Century, the Irish gentleman convict Sir Henry Browne Hayes surrounded Vaucluse, the house he built near South Head in Sydney Harbour, with a moat of Irish peat turf in the belief that the soil, coming from a land once blessed by St Patrick, would prevent snakes from crossing over into the property. Hayes had earlier been transported for kidnapping an Irish heiress and forcibly marrying her for her money so it could be argued that the real snake in this story was to be found inside already. Curiously though, it was later claimed in an exercise of wishful thinking that the moat had been highly effective in achieving its goal.

The wife of the Lieutenant Governor of Van Diemen’s Land, Lady Jane Franklin had her own ideas about snakes and was so concerned by what she saw as the problem on the island that when she came to the Colony in 1839 she personally funded a bounty of a shilling for the head of every snake killed. The scheme brought ridicule and she was persuaded to abandon it when it became clear that the convicts were neglecting their work to pursue Lady Jane’s money for jam. Certainly it didn’t have the effect on the island’s snake population that Lady Jane hoped or which a similar bounty scheme on the Tasmanian Tiger that was introduced at about the same time would bring. That scheme resulted in that particular Tiger’s eventual extinction.

The snake bounty cost Lady Jane £600 in one season but she was not the sort of person to sit at home idly pouring tea as the wife of the Lieutenant Governor when she wanted something done. She purchased 130 acres (53 ha) of land near Hobart Town for a botanical garden where she built a museum of natural history and in 1843 when the Franklins left the Colony, she handed over 400 acres (162 ha) for a university. Two years later, Sir John Franklin was named the commander of the infamous expedition that, in an attempt to find the fabled Northwest Passage, became trapped in the ice where it descended into madness and destruction. Lady Jane never accepted the death of her husband and for decades after the Admiralty had officially given up hope of finding survivors, personally funded multiple search expeditions into the Arctic. On one occasion she travelled to Out Stack, the northern most part of the Shetland Islands of Scotland and the north most part of the British Isles just to get as close as she possibly could to her missing husband. Not surprisingly she found Out Stack uninhabited by people, missing expeditioners, and snakes.

Lady Jane never fully realized some of her ambitions. Her museum of natural history was converted into an apple store after her departure from Van Diemen’s Land and her husband’s missing polar exploring ships were not found until this century. As for ridding Tasmania of snakes, that barmy idea was never going to get anywhere and had about as much legs as a snake. The reality is, snakes do play an important middle-order predator link in the chain of our ecosystem and they help keep the numbers of introduced pests like rats and mice under control. That’s why in most Australian states, snakes and other reptiles are protected under the Nature Conservation Act of 1992 and to kill and injure or take one from the wild may incur a fine up to $7,500, or even a jail sentence.

So should you ever experience that creeping feeling in the garden that something is watching you with its cold, reptilian stare, please don’t panic. Remember that the watcher like most other things in this world has a place and its own reason for being. The danger of the snake is real but there is beauty also, a metaphor for life itself really.

An explanation of the NEL for those who can’t see the wood for the impending tree stumps

“Formulating policy means making choices. Once you do that you please the people that you favour, but infuriate everybody else. One vote gained, ten lost. If you give the job to the road services, the rail board and unions will scream. Give it to the railways, the road lobby will massacre you.”
Sir Humphrey Appleby spelling out the fractious world of transport policy, Episode 5, Series 3, Yes Minister, “The Bed of Nails”, 1982.

The release of a little light reading in the form of a voluminous, Environmental Effects Statement by the North East Link Authority last month has been received with interested concern by some, derided by others, while yet proving the truth of that old adage, “When you try to please everybody, you end up pleasing no one.”

The $16 billion Link, which in effect will extirpate the western end of the Yallambie estate with a sunken surface road parallel to the Greensborough Hwy, is due to open in 2027 and is projected to funnel an extra 100,000 cars a day onto an expanded Eastern Freeway by 2036, up to a total of 135,000 with traffic experts rightly summing it up as:

“…a short-sighted solution to population growth and would only increase the city’s dependence on cars.” (Clay Lucas, The Age, April 25, 2019).

Looking south along Greensborough Rd towards Blamey Rd from a point near to the Yallambie Rd intersection. The current view presented alongside a NELA artist’s impression of the proposed changes. The EES gives this change of view a low to medium rating “due to the low sensitivity of road users”. In other words, the view is already plug ugly. (Source: NELA, EES)

While reaching any agreement on Melbourne roads is about as easy it seems as reaching nuclear agreement on the Korean Peninsula, there seems to be a consensus in some quarters that the north east of Melbourne is already an unsustainably car dependent side of town and a suspicion that the creation of a Link will simply encourage thousands more commuters to leave the existing train networks in favour of roads.

Thomas and Sarah Ann Wragge outside Yallambie Homestead, c1910, Thomas was one of the first owners of a motor car in the Heidelberg district. (Source: Bill Bush Collection).

Short sections of the Eastern Freeway are expected to expand to up to 20 lanes to accommodate the project but as has been proved time again all around the world, as a general rule of thumb the building of major road projects increases traffic volumes without a commensurate decrease in congestion. After those 20 lanes narrow back to six or eight further along the way, what will happen to the extra traffic? Jago Dodson, a professor of urban policy at RMIT University, summed this up by saying that when it comes to NEL, Melbourne is fast heading “towards the failed situation of Sydney where they try to reconcile the incoherence of planning by building large mega projects.” With Melbourne already predicted to outstrip Sydney in size by 2026, it’s not rocket science.

Detail of a display board at NELA Community Hub information office.

As an environmental report, the North East Link Authority’s 10,000 page Environmental Effects Statement I must say is a daunting prospect. I don’t suppose there are many who will manage to read it in its entirety. I certainly haven’t done so, but then maybe that’s just the point. As Sir Humphrey would tell you, if you want to make sure some awkward truths stay ignored, try hiding them away in plain sight inside the detail.

NELA Community Hub office in Watsonia Rd, Watsonia.

You can look at the report locally at an information office that the NELA has opened at 17 Watsonia Rd, Watsonia but for what it’s worth, here is the hard reality of just a little bit of that detail, spelled out here before the first bulldozer rolls past your door next year.

It will be no use saying afterwards we weren’t warned.

The North East Link project will require the permanent acquisition of a combined total of 182,300 square metres of open territory and recreational areas. This is the equivalent of nine MCGs spread across the municipalities of Whitehorse, Yarra, Boroondara, Manningham and Banyule. Dual 3 lane road tunnels will be built under Heidelberg and Bulleen with 12-storey ventilation stacks being needed at either end, including one inside the Simpson Barracks at Yallambie south of  Blamey Rd. Three temporary construction compounds will be developed at the Barracks, one at the north west corner of Yallambie and Greensborough roads, a second on the south side of Blamey Road extending south and a third extending further south along the western flank of Greensborough Rd.

The Banyule creek at Borlase Reserve, May, 2019.

About three kilometres of water flowing through two separate creeks will need to be diverted and turned into drains, including the Banyule Creek which has its source within the south western boundary of Yallambie and which in turn feeds the magnificent wetlands environment of the Banyule Flats Reserve over in Viewbank.

Up to 26,000 trees will be removed by the project with open space at Koonung Reserve, Koonung Creek Reserve, Watsonia Station Carpark Reserve and Watsonia Rd Reserve all being lost.

Borlase Reserve woodland, May, 2019.

The northern end of the Borlase Reserve, May, 2019. Already heavily scarred from its use as a construction zone during the recent redevelopment of Rosanna Station, it is the only part of the Reserve that will be returned to the community after NEL opens.

Borlase Reserve in the south western corner of Yallambie near the Lower Plenty and Greensborough Rd intersection will be particularly hard hit. Borlase Reserve will be entirely consumed by a construction compound during the build with less than half of it expected to be returned to the Yallambie community after construction of the Lower Plenty Rd interchange, potentially making the area no longer viable as an area of passive open space. A four metre high noise wall will be a visually dominant feature around the Lower Plenty Rd interchange which will result in a significant and permanent change to the landscape in the nearby surrounding residential streets.

Willow trees and the source of the Banyule Creek at Borlase Reserve, Yallambie, May, 2019.

The above-ground sections of the road link are expected to have the biggest and most obvious environmental impact with eight hectares of woodland in Yallambie’s Simpson Barracks alone expected to be destroyed, impacting kangaroos and other wild life along the way by removing their habitat. Hundreds of large, mature trees will either be cleared away during this process or lose water supply to their roots and die, but a trade-off promise to replace lost trees with 30,000 new plantings will take decades to have any significant effect. Of special mention is a 300 year old River Red Gum near a service station in Bulleen which is on the National Trust Significant Tree Register. A local landmark, it is just one of those ear marked for the big chop while another 150 other patches of native vegetation spread over 52 hectares will be removed, including 22 hectares where native and threatened wildlife are found.

Giant mouse soon to be made homeless at Borlase Reserve, Yallambie, May, 2019.

So that in a nut shell is what the North East Link Authority is all about. I find it a source of wonder that there hasn’t been more objection heard about this project up to date with the plan still wading around in its early stages. The failed East West Link project copped far more flak, and that misguided idea never moved further than a few lines pushed around a map with some properties peremptorily and unnecessarily acquired before an election. Part of the reason for this apparent lack of interest could be that all those car users living in Melbourne’s heavily car dependent north east may actually be in favour of the road when push comes to shove. It’s an attitude that might hold water with those people who drive on Rosanna Rd regularly, comfortable in the belief that the new road won’t necessarily roll out anywhere near their own back yard, but there is also the Government’s successful policy of divide and conquer to take into consideration, a policy which was implemented to such good effect in the second half of 2017. That battle became a bit of a running theme in this blog for a while, but by suggesting four potential routes for NEL right from the start, Corridors A, B, C and D, the net effect has been largely to dilute the argument right across the board.

Last week Banyule Council, while acknowledging the Government’s mandate to complete the road, released their own, well-considered proposal to modify the existing plan of Corridor A. The Council’s alternative involves a road tunnel that would be 2 kilometres longer than the current 6 km design, increasing the cost by an estimated $350 million and take an extra 1 ½ years longer to complete. It’s a design however the Council says would spare us many of the negative social and environmental consequences of the project. Critics have quickly lined up to dismiss the changes and list what they see as a range of possible negative effects, including a temporary occupation as a work site of a part of Watsonia Primary School and the AK Lines Reserve, and a longer than anticipated shut down of the Hurstbridge rail line around Watsonia Station, but Banyule Council’s Cr Tom Melican speaking in support of the Council proposal said:

“We’re spending an enormous amount of money, dividing the community and wrecking parkland; we’d better make sure we get it right.”

With the environmental impact still a matter of debate, there seems to me to be plenty of opportunity here to get it wrong.

Misty morning at Yallambie with Hoop Pine, photographed in August, 2014.

The writings of the early settlers in this country are filled with observations of the harsh climate they encountered and the difficulties they had reconciling local conditions with what they left behind in Europe. It is known that cool and moist air inside a forest can contribute to rainfall in a process called stomata, but the lesson those settlers eventually learned is, you cut down trees at the peril of the environment in this dry country. After more than 180 years of settlement, Victoria is now reportedly the most deforested state in Australia and more than 60 per cent of the forest that existed at the time of John Batman’s arrival is now gone.

Yallambie Park oak avenue photographed in 1995.

Scientists have gathered much evidence to support a claim that trees and the natural environment can improve our mood and general state of health, although in practice the jury is out as to exactly how or why this occurs. One theory is that beneficial bacteria, plant derived essential oils and negatively charged ions all combine to increase our well being. Another way of looking at this would be to simply say that being connected to nature provides us with relief from the stress and anxieties of modern living. A North East Link road might solve a transport problem in an ever expanding capital city, but how much is the solution also contributing to some of those stresses? Does the end justify the means?

The planned walking trail would pass through forest on the Errinundra Plateau. (Source: The Age, Goongerah Environment Centre)

Before the last State election, the Government announced a plan to build a 120km hiking trail that would extend from the Cape Conran Coastal Park to the summit of Mt Ellery and the alpine forests of the Errinundra Plateau. It was a pitch to the conservation vote during an election campaign which aimed to create a “Sea-to-Summit” walking track through some of the State’s last remaining areas of unspoiled wilderness. It sounded like a good idea at the time but after the Government was re-elected it transpired that the chosen route passed through many areas already ear marked by VicForests for logging and some clear felling had already begun.

Challenged by the media exposure of this story, Alex Messina, VicForests’ General Manager of Corporate Affairs dismissed the walking trail idea saying that part of the proposed track fell along an access route created for logging trucks.

“The route in remotest east Victoria utilises roads designed for timber haulage, not to optimise scenic tourism experience.”
(Alex Messina, quoted in The Age, February 13, 2019)

Birthing tree of the Djab Wurrung people. (Source: The Age, Gillian Trebilcock)

The cultural value of our trees is a sometimes under appreciated resource. Out in western Victoria, VicRoads is currently planning to duplicate a 12 ½ kilolmetre section of the Western Hwy from Buangor to Ararat to reduce travel time on the route by an estimated two minutes. The VicRoads plan will require the destruction of over 260 trees sacred to the Djap Wurrung peoples, including an Indigenous birthing tree, with one elder, Sandra Onus,  quoted in The Age saying, “We’re just trying to keep as much of our cultural heritage intact as we can. They won’t listen to us blackfellas.”

Banyule’s Yallambie Bakewell ward councillor, Cr Mark Di Pasquale in email correspondence to us relating to North East Link, voiced a similar concern:

“It needs to be an honest discussion and the community need to voice their wants. Up until now the NE Link Authority has been ‘steamrolling’ through with their work… We are looking to the Army, the traders the residents and finally the State Members to push this barrow.”

Droving in the Light, Hans Heysen, 1914-21. (Source: Wikipedia, the Art Gallery of South Australia)

Tree felling of ancient river red gum at Seymour Rd, Lower Plenty in the early 1920s. The property on the opposite ridge is Bryn Teg, later the Heidelberg Golf Club.

The idea that trees might have an aesthetic value beyond their monetary or utilitarian worth might strike some as a surprise, although it is by no means a new concept. Artwork by that famed painter of Australian landscapes, Hans Heysen, is currently on display alongside work by his daughter Nora at a special exhibition at the NGV in Federation Square. Hans, who turned the ubiquitous Aussie gum tree into a work of art in the early years of the 20th century, was famous in his own life time but is sometimes also remembered for his attitude towards conservation in an era when most people never gave it a thought. The story goes that when Hans heard that a road side stand of gum trees he loved was to be removed by his local Council, he approached the authorities and offered to give them the money the Council would otherwise have received for selling the trees as fire wood. It is unrecorded whether those early Council authorities laughed in his face at the suggestion or instead laughed all the way to the bank.

It seems then that the North East Link might not be the only road likely to trample over the environment and the enjoyment of peoples’ lives. It’s just the latest and the largest and by far and away the most expensive.

In Yes Minister, in an episode about the conservation of a wildlife habitat, Sir Humphrey Appleby assured the minister that there are some things that are just best kept out of the public debate. In that episode, “The Right to Know” he burdens the minister’s correspondence with useless detail in an attempt to keep his political master in the dark while explaining to him a fine line of distinction between classing something as a “loss” or “not a significant loss” to the environment.

“Almost anything can be attacked as a “loss of amenity”, and be defended as “not a significant loss of amenity”.
Sir Humphrey Appleby, Episode 6, Series 1, Yes Minister, “The Right to Know”, 1980.

The NEL will obviously cause a huge loss of amenity in the north eastern suburbs of Melbourne and in particular, within the City of Banyule. Taking a page out of Sir Humphrey’s book, the North East Link Authority have cleverly passed this off as not a significant loss of amenity by releasing so much detail about their plans that it seems most people have given up listening.

Once the traffic starts rolling on the new Freeway in a few years’ time, do you think this will make any difference?

By then, will we still be able to see the wood for the tree stumps?

Woodland sign posting north of Borlase Reserve, Yallambie, May, 2019.

Vale Banyule

The Australian writer and historian Don Watson once posed the tempting question, “What will history make of us should there be any historians left to write it?”

The news last week that the State Government had decided on Corridor A as the chosen route for the North East Link freeway leaves a devastating conflict of emotions for nearby communities. There is the feeling of relief that the alternative B, C and D roads will now, at least not for the time being, be built, but this is coupled with a general feeling of dismay at the destruction Corridor A is likely to wreak.

Corridor A when built will largely cut an underground path under Viewbank and Rosanna, with road interchanges located at Bulleen and Lower Plenty Roads, but it will be the surface road parallel with Greensborough Road along the Western boundary of Yallambie with Macleod and in Watsonia in the north, together with the associated road interchanges at either end that will have the most obvious visual impact. At least 75 homes are expected be lost to the plan and it’s pretty clear to anyone familiar with the local area just where these are likely to be.

The government spent $100 million to write a study of their four, so called alternative routes which included the utter surprise of their Corridor B proposal through the heart of Yallambie, but in the end the extra corridors were a smoke screen, an attempt to muddy the water surrounding a proposal to build Corridor A which, because it was expected to be cheaper, was always going to be the favoured option.

Melbourne’s road network with missing links from Vicroads publication “Linking Melbourne”, February, 1994.

Corridor A has been talked about ever since something like it was first proposed in the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan. It wasn’t built because enough people could see back then that it was a bad idea. So what has changed? A decade ago the proposal was still on the table and costed at $6 billion, but last week’s announcement rings in now at over $16 billion. The real question then is, just how much is this thing going to cost eventually, and I don’t just mean in dollar terms.

Perhaps the NELA aren’t aware of some of the worry and the sleepless nights that they have given Yallambie and Lower Plenty residents since the first suggestion of Corridor B was disclosed in August. Perhaps they don’t care. This sort of cavalier attitude is nothing new, as the recent to-ing and fro-ing over the abandoned East West Link proposal is evidence, but fifty years ago the following story illustrates perhaps just how strongly passions can run on such matters.

In the mid 1960s, at a time before the first spade had been turned on Melbourne’s freeway network, a plan was developed by Doncaster and Templestowe City Council in conjunction with the Country Roads Board to widen Templestowe Rd in Templestowe at the Thompsons Road intersection. The plan when first discussed involved realigning Templestowe Rd at its closest approach to the Yarra River with Parker St in the east, through the heart of the Templestowe township.

Finn’s Upper Yarra Hotel on Templestowe Rd, Templestowe. (Source: Doncaster Templestowe Historical Society)

But there was a problem. Finn’s Upper Yarra Hotel, a local landmark of some renown, stood right in the path of the new road.

An early view of the Upper Yarra Hotel before the addition of the west wing.

The Upper Yarra Hotel was a much loved building. James Finn had opened his hotel as a beer shop on the Templestowe corner in 1866, near what is now a vanished river crossing, and over the years various additions had been made to it which had combined to create a strange amalgamation of architectural styles. The idiosyncratic compact construction of the original building seemed to stand at odds with the later, two-storey block fronted section but somehow they combined almost by accident to form a building of considerable rambling charm.

The Upper Yarra was delicenced in the early 1920s but as it aged and became more dilapidated the rustic appeal of its setting became a favoured subject for local artists. The various parts of the hotel itself were painted a rusty red colour in an attempt to bring unity to its conflicting parts and as the paint peeled the overpainted words “Finn’s Upper Yarra Hotel” stood out like a ghostly commentary as to the building’s former life, an old world garden and a cobbled stable yard behind the hotel completing the overall effect of a genteel rural decay.

Finn’s Hotel photographed towards the end of its life by John T Collins in 1963. (Source: State Library of Victoria)

The grown up grandchildren of James Finn were still living somewhat reclusive lives at the old hotel in the mid 1960s when the Council came a knockin’. Doncaster and Templestowe City Council had purchased the land on which the Upper Yarra Hotel stood from the executors of the estate of the son of James Finn and the Council were trying to force his grandchildren from the building which the surviving generation still occupied. The Council met with some militant but probably understandable opposition from the residents who objected to being moved away from the building their family had occupied for over a hundred years. One contemporary newspaper report described how a party of journalists was chased away from the hotel environs one evening in 1967 by an aging Finn brother wielding a big stick, smashing up a photographer’s car in the process in the mistaken belief that the newspaper party were officers from the Housing Commission come to enforce an eviction order.

Finn’s Hotel seen from near the corner of Templestowe and Thompsons Rd, Templestowe. (Source: Doncaster Templestowe Historical Society)

In the end the Council got their way of course and the Finns removed themselves voluntarily from the building on the 28^th May, 1967. On the night of departure however a mysterious fire broke out in the old weatherboarded building, quickly reducing it to a pile of cinder and rubble in spite of the best efforts of the Country Fire Authority to combat the blaze.

The end of Finn’s Upper Yarra Hotel on the night of 28 May, 1967 as reported in “The Sun” news pictorial the next day.

Newspaper clipping from the front page of the Doncaster and Outer Circle Mirror, 27 September, 1967.

It was a tragic loss to history for the area. The Council had been discussing the possibility of moving the hotel out of the path of the imagined road realignment in a manner that they would later employ to save another historic Doncaster building, Schramm’s Cottage, in the 1970s. The fire put an end to any further discussion, Ad infinitim.

Eventually the Council accepted a cheque of $365.95 as compensation for the loss of the building, but the money was not really the point. The final irony in the telling of this story is that when the realignment of Templestowe Rd eventually took place, a decision was made to straighten the route to meet with Foote St parallel to Parker Street, which is the situation as it exists today. If Finn’s Hotel had been standing and not by then a pile of ashes, it would have been in the clear.

Today a so called “History Pavilion” on Templestowe Rd, Templestowe marks the site of the former Upper Yarra Hotel, with photographs plastered around the interior detailing the (now mostly vanished) history of the area. It is a strangely sad, not often visited tribute.

“History Pavillion,” at Templestowe on the site of the Upper Yarra Hotel, November, 2017. The bricks used in the cairn were salvaged from the ruins of the hotel after the fire.

So how does this story affect the reality of the Corridor A proposal for North East Link? The above tale is an example that road plans are not set in stone until such time as they are actually set in concrete, whether they be tunnels or tarmac and you don’t have to burn down a building to find this out. Melbourne University transport lecturer John Stone was quoted in a newspaper story about State Government transport spin doctoring in The Age last month saying that, “Communities are presented with Maggie Thatcher’s old line – ‘There is no alternative’ – and often there is. But under the current system, the community can only be heard if they can create enough political will to be heard.”

Opponents of North East Link Corridor A have called a public meeting today on a rainy afternoon at Koonung Creek Reserve, Balwyn North and the AGM of the Friends of Banyule is scheduled for Thursday night at the old Shire offices in Beverley Rd, Heidelberg where there will be no prizes offered for guessing what will be the main item on the agenda that night. The opposition to Corridor A in these neighbourhoods is understandable but by any reckoning, the real opposition to the route should be coming from groups here in the north. Corridor A will be a surface road when it passes through Greensborough, Watsonia and Yallambie/Macleod and two of the three major new road interchanges will be situated here. The lack of opposition here however is the result of the earlier sleight of hand exercise conducted by NELA when they divided community opposition with the suggested alternative Corridors, B, C and D. That’s what the State Government got for spending a $100 million to investigate the alternative corridors, although they said at the time the money was to be used to cover the cost of “geotechnical investigations, design, environmental and social studies”. The cold, hard reality is that Corridor A will have a devastating effect on the City of Banyule, dividing the municipality in two in a north south direction along Greensborough Rd while doing little to relieve the very real traffic problems in the area. Vale to the City of Banyule.

Like the Finns at the old Upper Yarra Hotel, the lives knocked about by these road proposals are real people with real homes, each with their own story to tell and each with a sense of community and belonging. $16 billion and counting sounds to me like an awful lot of money to be spending on building a road, a road that won’t even do what it is intended to do, that is complete the missing link in Melbourne’s Ring Road system. Look at a map of the proposed route of Corridor A and you will see that the Corridor A route does not contribute to a ring at all but is a dent in the road plan, driving ring bound traffic back towards the city before asking it to fan out again in an easterly direction.

Melbourne’s road network with proposed North East Links from RA, September, 2017. Corridor A is the shorter, therefore theoretically cheaper dotted line to the left at Bulleen.

So when is a ring not a ring? When it is a link in the eyes of the North East Link Authority. The building of Corridor A will not remove the need to build a completed ring through Eltham in years to come. The thing is, by then the State will be so bankrupt that this will never happen, no matter what needs might then be presented. By that time too with the advent of AVs (autonomous vehicles), cars as we know them now might be a thing of the past, which poses some interesting speculation in answer to Don Watson’s original conundrum.

 

Slipping over on the highway of life

It’s a bit of a cliché, but the incongruous sight of men leaning on shovels around a road sign announcing the apparent falsehood, “men at work”, is one we are all familiar with. In Tarcoola Drive, Yallambie at the start of April one such sign went up on the nature strip near the corner. It read “roadwork ahead”, a precursor to sawn lines being cut into the road surface in front of it, then – nothing. It has been like that for a month, a road hazard if not actual roadwork, evidence that somebody at the road depot at least has a sense of humour. There the sign has stood forgotten, oblivious to traffic and to all intents and purposes seemingly abandoned. Eventually a motorist missing the corner drove right on over it, bending it into a shape like banana or a boomerang made by an First Nations Aussie on a bad day.

“Road work” at the Tarcoola Drive/Yallambie Road intersection, May, 2017.

The intention I’m told is to build new kerb “outstands” on the corner. These projecting kerbs are intended to reduce the speeds of vehicles entering and exiting Tarcoola Drive by making the turn disproportionately more dangerous. Yallambie’s Thomas Wragge, who owned one of the very first motor cars in the Heidelberg district, is said to have preferred a horse and cart. He may have been right.

Thomas and Sarah Ann Wragge in a Brazier outside Yallambie Homestead shortly before the death of Thomas in 1910. (Source: Bill Bush collection)

Roads were an early priority of this area and it has been argued by D S Garden that the creation of the Heidelberg Road Trust in 1841 constituted the earliest known form of local government within the Port Phillip District. The road to Heidelberg had been formed in 1839 and was known initially as the “Great Heidelberg Road”. It was laid out by the surveyor J Townsend who followed a line that was more or less parallel to the Yarra River.

Lower Plenty Road in Rosanna, 1914 looking south west towards the Upper Heidelberg Road intersection. The approach to Yallambie was behind the photographer of this picture. (Source: Heidelberg Historical Society image).

Junction of Lower Heidelberg Road and Banksia Street in Heidelberg, 1896. The recreation hall owned by Yallambie’s Thomas Wragge is in the centre of the picture. (Source: Heidelberg Historical Society image).

I picture Townsend in those far off days whistling the highs and lows of “The Bonnie Banks of Loch Lomond” as he surveyed his route, the design splitting Heidelberg Road into two paths after the Darebin Creek ford. His Upper Heidelberg Road, known initially as the Nillumbik Road, ran along the top of the ridge while the Lower Heidelberg Road, first called the Mount Eagle Road, followed the valley contours.

The Heidelberg Road commanded regular traffic from its inception. The route beyond to the Diamond Valley and Lower Plenty initially led to a ford over the Plenty River near what is now Martins Lane. Although shorter this route was discarded in 1840 in favour of the current line which was considered easier. William Greig, who as recounted previously farmed at Yallambie in that year, used this way regularly to visit town. That was until the early perilous condition of its surface sent his pony lame. Richard Howitt meanwhile, who lived on the Heidelberg Road at Alphington and who we remember for his visit to his Bakewell brothers in law at Yallambee in mid-1842, was equally unimpressed.

A beautiful town is Melbourne,
All by the Yarra’s side;
Its streets are wide, its streets are deep –
They are both deep and wide

Escaping from one quagmire,
There’s room enough for more;
Such a beautiful town as Melbourne
Was never seen before…

(Richard Howitt, Impressions of Australia Felix, p299)

One of the first tasks of the Heidelberg Road Trust then was to macadamise the road surface, a process that was commenced in 1842 and which was to introduce a technology which had not long been developed in Britain. The metal for the project came from a bluestone quarry at Alphington on the west bank of the Darebin Creek. As the colony emerged from the economic stupor of the 1840s, visitors to the Heidelberg district were astonished by the experience of travelling on a luxury road that boasted an incredible macadamized surface, the first in the Port Phillip District. In March, 1848, Bishop Perry wrote after travelling on this road that:

“Yesterday we drove to Heidelberg, which is the most settled part of the country. The distance from Melbourne is about eight miles, and the road is the only made road in the colony… Here and there we went along, were neatly piled up heaps of broken stone, ready for mending the road, just as you see in England; and at places we found men at work with shovels levelling, filling up holes etc.”

Almost a decade later in 1857, an attempt was made to reform the Heidelberg Road Trust by declaring the district a municipality. It failed after a petition opposing the move, led by the leading gentry of the region, was delivered to the government. Yallambee’s Bakewell brothers must have been getting ready for their return to England when they signed but all the same, their names appear there near the top of the parchment alongside such luminaries as Hawdon of Banyule, Martin of Viewbank, McArthur of Chartresville and what amounts to a mid-19^th century virtual who’s who of the Heidelberg district. It appears there had been some disagreement over which part of the Heidelberg Road would most benefit from spending of the available road finances. The Bakewells, preoccupied with their return to England, possibly believed no money should be spent on it at all.

Service station on Main Road in Lower Plenty, c1960.

Service station at Watsonia, c1950. (Source: Greensborough Historical Society)

Transportation has changed and roads might be different but disagreements about spending on infrastructure hasn’t changed that much in the one and a half centuries since. The present State government dropped more than a billion dollars to dump the East West Freeway when it came into office, all to prove a point. In the State Budget announced today, the same government released plans to spend another $100 million on a feasibility study of a North East Link, the so called missing link between the Western Ring Road and Melbourne’s south east.

Burgundy Street in Heidelberg, 1950 at the Lower Heidelberg Road intersection. (Source: Picture Victoria, Heidelberg Historical Society image).

The North East Link is an old idea that harks back nearly half a century to the “1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan” which it might be argued was an attempt to turn Melbourne into a Los Angeles of the south. They largely succeeded in that plan for as a contractor once told Arthur Dent shortly before his planet was demolished by the Vogons, “It’s a bypass, you have to build bypasses.” The glaring exception however was the freeway that was to have been built through Heidelberg. Carrying the moniker F-18, the 1969 plan was to drive it through the Heidelberg community like a Thunderbirds’ atomic road maker, road laying machine, cutting a swathe through the landscape. Thankfully the plan was abandoned in the early 1970s and the land in Buckingham Drive and Banyule Road at either end of the freeway reserve was later sold for housing. The Freeway reserve is still there in between in the form of  a linear park but the plan is now to either build a tunnel under the City of Banyule or direct the route further out through Nillumbik Shire. Either option fills nearby communities with impending dread.

In Banyule, on a local and I might say, somewhat “smaller” scale, the City Council set aside $38,000 in the 2016/17 Budget for the work near us in Tarcoola Drive mentioned at the start of this post. However, they tell me that they are determined to spend only about half of that amount this year, the rest being put aside presumably for when they feel like coming back to do the job properly. Maybe they’ve run out of money already.

Mid 90’s Council proposal for a retrofitted roundabout at the corner of Tarcoola Drive and Yallambie Road that was never built.

Council plan of proposed kerb side alterations to intersection of Tarcoola Drive and Yallambie Road, December, 2016.

Like the F-18 on a larger scale, this is not the first attempt to deal with a perceived traffic problem in Yallambie. In the mid ’90s there was a proposal drawn up to transform the same corner into a retro fitted roundabout, a project aimed at slowing traffic in Yallambie Road, as opposed to the current attempt at slowing traffic in Tarcoola Drive. That roundabout was never built, but was constructed instead onto the corner of Binowee Avenue and Yallambie Road near the shop with speed bumps formed at the approaches.

To add a bit of currency to an old problem, yesterday afternoon our son came in from school and said that as he crossed Lower Plenty Road to Yallambie Road with a green pedestrian light, he had”nearly been run over by a car turning the corner.” In 1993, during the development of Yallambie’s Streeton Views subdivision, the Traffic Engineer for the project Greg Tucker reported that a grade separated pedestrian overpass across Lower Plenty Road to the schools in Viewbank was unwarranted. “The provision of traffic signals at Grantham and Crew Street would incorporate pedestrian crossing facilities in any event…” (City of Heidelberg business paper, 8 Feb, 1993). In subsequent developments, the Martins Lane intersection was substituted for Grantham Street.

The sharp bend at the Old Lower Plenty Road Bridge was a notorious local traffic hazard until the realignment of Lower Plenty Road across the modern bridge. (Source: Greensborough Historical Society, Eltham Historical Society image)

I’ve heard tell that it used to be an unofficial policy at VicRoads to undertake remedial roadwork but to do so only after a road death had occurred. A bit like shutting the barn door after the horse has bolted. The profusion of roundabouts and speed bumps at the northern end of Yallambie Road are something that was added after 1980 and only after the pedestrian death of a child on Yallambie Road near the Primary School. In those days Yallambie Road was a sort of alternative route to Eltham bound traffic on Greensborough Road. The 46 page “Yallambie Road Traffic Study” prepared by Nelson English, Loxton & Andrews for Heidelberg Council in 1982 reported that approximately a third of all traffic on Yallambie Road was through traffic and that up to 78% of traffic exceeded the then maximum 60 km/h speed limit with the highest speed recorded at 100km/h. The report also noted that the impending signalisation at both ends of Yallambie Road was expected to result in even more through traffic.

The decision three years later to extend Elonera Avenue, Yallambie in the City of Heidelberg through to Elder Street, Greensborough in the Shire of Diamond Valley as a part of the Daniel’s sub division opened up another access point into Yallambie, This time from Greensborough in the north. The Yallambie Community Association which was a then very active institution, strongly opposed this connection, but their collective voice remained carefully ignored by those who make the decisions. Once again the ad hoc solution has been to retrofit speed humps, this time along Elonera Avenue.

An aerial survey photograph made of the still some what under developed Yallambie area prior to 1971. Note the abrupt end of Elonera Ave to the left of the roundabout, before its extension as a part of the Daniel’s property sub division.

The folly of creating communities without satisfactory infrastructure is nothing new. What happened at Fishermen’s Bend in Port Melbourne is a case in point and is a classic example of what can happen when the profits of a few investors and developers are put ahead of the interests of the wider community. At Fishermen’s Bend, a few property developers, mostly with connections to the then Liberal State Government, became insanely wealthy overnight when the former industrial land they had invested in was rezoned with a stroke of a pen to allow multistorey apartment buildings. Some individuals made profits of over 500% on their investments but planning for residential infrastructure such as schools and roads was almost completely disregarded in the process, leaving taxpayers to pick up the tab at a later date. It has been described as a classic example of how not to develop land ear marked for urban renewal.

Sometimes it’s not about what you know but who you know along this highway of life. The Premier of Victoria at the time of the release of the 1969 Melbourne Transportation Plan freeway blueprint was the legendary, late Sir Henry Bolte. Ol’ Henry reportedly enjoyed a tipple now and then but in March 1984, long after his retirement as Premier, Bolte suffered serious injuries when the car he was driving collided with another vehicle near his home. Surveys here and abroad have consistently reported that the majority of road accidents happen near our homes but in this case it was alleged at the time that Henry had been drink driving. In the end, charges were never laid after the police mysteriously “lost” the blood sample taken from the injured ex-Premier after his crash.

The Bolte Bridge, named after Victoria’s longest serving premier. It spans the Yarra River and Victoria Harbour as a part of the CityLink road system. (Source: Wikipedia)

Bolte recovered but his legacy remains in the testament of the road network that he envisaged and that has been built right across greater Melbourne. Maybe one day we will all be travelling in driverless Tesla cars on this network, but the vote as far as it affects Banyule remains out.

Personally my money’s all on a future involving the Jetsons’ flying car.

Select sources: Heidelberg - The Land and Its People, D S Garden; The Diamond Valley Story, D H Edwards; The History of Our Roads, Maxwell Lay in The Heidelberg Historian, June 2005; Yallambie Road Traffic Study 1982, Nelson English, Loxton & Andrews; Yallambie Community Association papers; City of Heidelberg business paper, Feb 1993

The Baron who pined

From the hanging gardens in Babylon and the capabilities of the very capable Brown of Great Britain, garden fashions have come and gone like the seasons, to be remembered now like the weeds in a Bangay box hedge. 19th century Australia was no exception to this rule and in 1865, the English nurseryman John Gould Veitch wrote while visiting Victoria that there had grown up in the colony “a very decided spirit for the introduction of any novelty which may be likely to prove of use or ornament to the gardens of the colony.”

“We’ve all seen the presence or former presence of colonial homes marked in country Victoria.” The colonial home “Buda” in Castlemaine marked by its historic garden, January, 2017.

There were many novelties to distract Victorian gardeners but of all of them, it was the craze for collections of pine trees, or pinetums as they were sometimes known, that has left the greatest mark on our millennial landscape. We’ve all seen the presence or former presence of colonial homes marked in country Victoria by stands of tall conifers, sometimes long after the settlers and sometimes the homes themselves have vanished. Collecting conifers was for a while a fashion in 19th century Victoria and no garden of any consequence in the colony could be said to be ever truly complete without its own resident selection of trees.

“Floraville”, the Bakewells’ garden at Yallambee Park was already well established before this coniferous craze properly kicked off but Thomas Wragge, who adopted Yallambee in the 1860s and who purchased the property in 1872, appears to have been well placed to take over at least in spirit where the Bakewells maybe left off.

Homestead photographed through the pines from the stand point of the former site of “Old Harry’s” Yallambie Cottage in 1995.

The background to this story has been shrouded by the passage of time but as mentioned in the previous post, the Yallambie identity “Old Harry” Ferne who lived on the river bank at Yallambie in the 1970s believed anecdotally that the pine trees that then surrounded his home were sourced from Victoria’s first Government Botanist and director of the Royal Botanic, Baron Ferdinand von Mueller. Winty Calder, writing in “Classing the Wool and Counting the Bales” repeats this legend but also speculates about the origins of the story, observing that:

“…von Mueller frequently gave seeds and plants to people. However, it is more likely that the Bakewells were the recipients of von Mueller’s plant material, during the period 1857-1873, than was Thomas. During those years von Mueller distributed many plants to public institutions and to private individuals, but he claimed in 1865 that ‘the distribution of plants to private gardens has been very limited and in reciprocation only’. Unfortunately the National Herbarium in Melbourne apparently now holds little of von Mueller’s correspondence with private individuals, such as Thomas Wragge or the Bakewells, or notes relating to associated exchange of plant material. But Thomas Wragge did gain possession of Yallambie two years before von Mueller ceased to be Director of the Botanic Gardens, even though he continued as Government Botanist. Before 1873, Thomas could have continued a plant exchange begun with the Bakewells, and it is not impossible that such an exchange might have continued for a few years after 1873…”

Even without a triplane, the “Green” Baron of Colonial Victoria certainly seems to have got around a bit. Public gardens were laid out at many goldfields centres with places like Ballarat, Bendigo, Castlemaine and Kyneton all receiving large numbers of trees and seeds for their Botanic Gardens from von Mueller. Indeed, a visit to a public garden in any reasonably sized town in country Victoria today will usually turn up at least a few trees with a claim to some sort of von Mueller provenance, with many of these trees being pines, araucarias or otherwise coniferous in nature.

Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, KCMG, chalk lithograph c1880. (Source: State Library of Victoria).

Baron Sir Ferdinand von Mueller, KCMG came to Australia in 1847, arriving in Victoria in 1851. In 1853, Lieutenant Governor Charles La Trobe appointed him to the newly created role of Victorian Government Botanist and from 1857 he was also the Director of Melbourne’s Botanic Gardens. Mueller travelled widely throughout Victoria on prolonged field trips and on just one jaunt into the hitherto unexplored Buffalo Mountains and Southern Gippsland, he covered 1500 miles and added 936 new species to the Victorian plant list.

From the very beginning of his directorship, (or should that read dictatorship), of the Gardens, von Mueller saw the Gardens as an important collecting and distribution centre for plants and seeds throughout the new colony. During the period 1857-8 alone, the record states that no fewer than 39 public institutions and 206 private applicants received plants from von Mueller’s department, with 7120 plants and 22,438 packets of seeds being distributed and 57 gardeners receiving live cuttings.

With these numbers in mind it seems to me very possible that von Mueller might well have supplied plant material to the Bakewells in the 1850s, possibly in a reciprocal exchange. The Bakewells had established their garden in the early 1840s and by the mid-1850s it was well established and in a good position to take part in such an exchange. Furthermore, from the first days of settlement, Robert Bakewell conducted the garden at Yallambee as an early and successful experiment in Victorian Acclimatisation, the colonial principles of which the Baron was a well-known and early active supporter.

John Bakewell, 1807-1888 (Source: Early Pioneer Families of Victoria and Riverina, Alexander Henderson, 1936)

Another point worth considering is that when it came to approach, plants were not the only thing von Mueller was known to cultivate. He cultivated working relationships with people of consequence and was often rewarded handsomely for it. Von Mueller collected titles throughout his life like they were going out of fashion with the “Sir”, “Baron” and the “von” parts of his name being all titles that were added to his name during his lifetime. Not only were the Bakewells well-connected by religious and familial ties to the Howitts and through them to the wider cultural elite of Melbourne, but “Yallambee Park” had been acknowledged within intellectual circles with several internationally publicized descriptions.

Edward La Trobe Bateman, (Source: National Library of New Zealand).

Edward Latrobe Bateman, whose association with the Station Plenty (Yallambee) has been recounted in considerable detail previously in these pages, is another contender for a Mueller connection at Yallambee. He had been described as a “splendid artist” by von Mueller and at the Intercolonial Exhibition of 1866 which Mueller helped arrange, Bateman decorated a Great Hall and a Rotunda. Significantly, Bateman also found considerable later success as a garden designer of both public and private gardens. Obviously these people were all moving within the same circles.

The Bakewell brothers Yallambee, view I by Edward La Trobe Bateman 1853-1856. (Source: National Gallery of Victoria).

Thomas Wragge’s Yallambie, c1900. (Source: Bill Bush Collection)

Moola Close near the entrance to Yallambie Park, 1978. In the words of “Old Harry” Ferne, quoted in a newspaper in 1982: “When I arrived in the area there was a forest of trees. Now there’s a forest of houses.”

Thomas Wragge by contrast was a farmer and although he would in time achieve pastoral success and considerable economic wealth, it has not been suggested that he moved within the same creative or intellectual associations as Bateman, or of the Bakewells and Howitts.

At any rate, whatever the origins of the Yallambie tree scape and whether Wragge inherited the genesis of the collection from the Bakewells, it seems clear now that Thomas and his family enjoyed the trees as they reached maturity at the end of the 19th century and that they probably continued to add to it up to and into the 20th.

Remains of Ferguson’s pinetum at Mt Eagle, 1929, photographed by C R Hartmann. (Source: National Library of Australia).

Remnant pines at Mt Eagle, 1929, photographed by C R Hartmann. (Source: National Library of Australia).

In the 19th century plant collectors achieved fame as they combed the continents in search of new pines and no gardener was considered worth his salt without an ability to provide his patron with a collection of at least some description.

At nearby Eaglemont, where elm trees were once saved at the expense of those in Yallambie, the forester William Ferguson planted a great pinetum, the largest in the colony, on the summit of “Mount Eagle” for J H Brooke as a prelude to a grand estate envisaged for that place. The first curator of the Geelong Botanic Gardens, Daniel Bunce visited in 1861 and recorded that “under the skilful management of his gardener Mr Ferguson”, Brooke had accumulated “the largest number of conifers of any establishment in the colony”. The house was never built and Ferguson left the project in 1863 with Brooke himself leaving for Japan four years later. However, in the 21st century at least some of Brooke’s trees remain, hidden away inside the private gardens of wealthy Eaglemont homes, proof of the enduring nature of the grown landscape and especially the legacy of 19th century pinetums.

At Yallambie the Bakewell/Wragge conifer collection survived well into the 20th century and its condition was intact enough to draw comment from Old Harry in the 1970s and 80s. Over the years many landscape reports and surveys were written identifying its importance, first by Heidelberg City Council and then, after 1994, by Banyule City Council. One of the first but certainly not the last of these reports “Plenty River & Banyule Creek” by Gerner Sanderson Faggetter Cheesman was published in October 1983 and noted that:

“The introduced species planted adjacent to the homestead, Yallambie, also require thoughtful management, not because of any problem they create, but rather because of their cultural importance. The planting here reflects past fashions of the Victorian era. Tall, dark foliage plants such as Pinus spp., Araucaria spp., planted quite randomly are all in fair condition…”

Old Harry had recently moved into a new home in Tarcoola Drive when that report was published but a few years later another report (previously quoted here) was delivered by Loder & Bayly, Marily McBriar, the recommendations of which in part read:

Lawn south of the house in 1984. The massive pinus on the left of picture upended down the slope one night a decade ago, its fall heard throughout the neighbourhood and sounding like “a steam train rushing by in the night.”

Another dead pinus standing between two Araucarias south of the house, 1998.

“An area which requires protection and sensitive management. Conservation of important historic plants, eg. conifers, and partial reconstruction of farm elements…”

More than 30 years later the value of these reports and others like them would seem to be only in the ongoing evidence they provide of what Council hasn’t managed to deliver over time. One by one and sometimes more than one the trees of the pinetum have gone to pot, collapsing sometimes in spectacular fashion. In the last 20 years alone I have by my own count seen more than a dozen of these trees vanish and, with the exception of the trees in a few private gardens, they have not been replaced.

All the same, the list of old plantings that remain today in Yallambie Park and within private gardens nearby still manages to read like some sort of pine growers’ plant catalogue. The list includes Araucaria bidwilli (Bunya Bunya Pine), Araucaria cunninghamii (Hoop Pine), Callitris glaucophyla (Murray River Cypress Pine), Cedrus deodara (Himalayan Cedar), Chamaecyparis funebris (Funeral Cypress), Cupressus lusitanica and Cupressus lusitanica glauca (Mexican Cypress), Cupressus macrocapa (Monterey Cypress), Cupressus sempervirens (Italian Cypress), Cupressus torulosa (Bhutan Cypress), Pinus canariensis (Canary Islands Pine), Pinus nigra var maritima (Black Pine), Pinus pinaster (Maritime Pine), Pinus pinea (Stone Pine) and Pinus radiata (Monterey Pine). As an exercise in botanical history, this list which was sourced from several of the more recent Banyule Council studies, is a tribute to the surprising longevity of some of these species at Yallambie and a memorial to the garden in which they once stood.

A novel approach taken to the problem of declining tree health in the pinetum at the former Botanic Gardens, Smythesdale, in country Victoria, January, 2017.

Garden fashions have come and gone and the popularity of pines within an Australian river environment long ago lost their allure. At Yallambie, in spite of the recommendations contained within numerous commissioned reports, exotic plantings have given way to a native landscape.

Council contractor fighting a losing battle with a whipper snipper on the bicycle path in Yallambie Park in front of the ruinous pinetum, February, 2017.

Following classification of the Yallambie landscape by the National Trust in 1998, Banyule Council has consistently argued that the classification holds no legal status and that the Council is under no obligation to conserve any of the historical elements within or adjacent to Yallambie Park.

Cypress planted by Robert Bakewell on the river bank, view XI by Edward La Trobe Bateman 1853-1856. (Source: National Gallery of Victoria).

As if to follow this cue, vandals imposing their own agenda once attacked one of Robert Bakewell’s Cypresses on the river bank, leaving the tree in a shockingly ringbarked state. The tree took months to die in a process that was heartbreaking to watch. A similar end was suffered by the 400 year old “Separation Tree”, a River Red Gum in the Royal Botanic Gardens that suffered two ringbarking attacks before its final demise a couple of years ago, leaving garden lovers and history buffs equally appalled.

The “Separation Tree” in the Royal Botanic Gardens, c1907. From an Edwardian postcard, (Source: State Library of Victoria). An impromptu crowd had gathered under the tree on 15 November, 1850 to hear the proclamation that officially separated the Colony of Victoria from New South Wales.

The late, lamented Separation Tree was already well over 200 years old when von Mueller began his directorship in 1857. In 1873 however, a year after Thomas Wragge completed his purchase of Yallambie, the Baron was summarily sacked from his position at the Gardens. It was felt within some quarters that von Mueller was more concerned with the science of plants than the business of creating a pleasure gardens for the leisured elite of Melbourne.

During his tenure Mueller had urged the establishment of a plantation of conifers at the Gardens, its purpose supposedly being to demonstrate the usefulness of the forestry industry to Victoria. Numerous trees remain from Mueller’s pinetum and can be found on the Garden’s Hopetoun and Hutingfield Lawns today but the humiliation of his situation was almost too much for a Baron to bear. After his dismissal legend has it that Mueller never again set foot inside the Gardens, pining like Adam outside the Gates of Eden.

William Guilfoyle, 1888. (Source: Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne).

The work of his replacement, Mueller’s protégé the young William Guilfoyle, is now mostly the landscape we see at the Royal Botanic Gardens today. After 1883 Guilfoyle remodelled Mueller’s pinetum, changing it from regimented avenues of trees to strategically placed specimens which survive in the Gardens today as signature trees. Von Mueller’s approach had gone out of fashion, his legacy dead seemingly like the Dodo.

Contemporary reports suggest that Von Mueller’s demise was the result of the lack of fountains and statues installed at the Gardens under his watch, the absence of which was keenly felt by the Melbourne masses who had a seemingly insatiable thirst for such things.

Statue of Baron von Mueller at Melbourne’s Royal Botanic Gardens. (Source: State Botanical Collection, Royal Botanic Gardens, Melbourne.)

Ironically, if you step off the tan and into the gardens today, one of the first things you may see hidden behind the neighbouring shrubbery outside the National Herbarium of Victoria, is a small statue of the good Baron himself. It was installed there in 1984 to mark 150 years of settlement, its presence in the Gardens seemingly illustrating a point. When it comes to gardening, if you wait long enough, inevitably you reap what you sow.

A taste of honey

We have a sticky situation.

The bees have made themselves at home behind the shingled walls of our verandah. On warm days the honey they make has been known to drip out onto the deck below, or even back into the ceiling inside the house where a stain on the plaster took several thousand licks of paint to conceal. Other than that though they don’t seem to be doing much real harm, and with the old verandah looking a bit shonky these days, it may be that honey is the only thing holding the whole humongous hotchpotch upright. With bees in trouble on several fronts, to my mind they might as well stay where they are. Our friends the bees are in need of all the help they can get.

Shingled verandah photographed in better repair in 1995.

You’ve probably heard that there’s something wrong with bees. They are on the decline worldwide with parasites, loss of habitat, pesticides and the mysterious colony collapse disorder held largely to blame, yet bees have been buzzing around this island earth since a time before the dinosaurs. As a motif they have long been used by man to symbolize industry and orderliness, yet on an evolutionary scale, it has taken us the mere blink of an eye to bring bees in this modern age to their bees’ bended knees.

Napoleon prided industry and orderliness and bee-lieved himself to be an emperor to boot, (watercolour on ivory by J Parent).

The experimental film director Godfrey Reggio introduced the Native American word “Koyaanisqatsi” to popular culture in 1982. In the Hopi language it means “unbalanced life”, but in the more than three decades since, the situation Reggio described in film has not changed. All over Melbourne right now, developers are smashing up gardens for multiple occupancy dwellings, tearing up farm land for new suburbs, all the while cynically leaving here and there an occasional geriatric gum tree or token strip of park to appease the regulators. It’s not much chop for the people but it’s tantamount to a desert landscape for bees.

Bee hive boufants from Koyaanisqatsi, (Godfrey Reggio, ©1983).

“…there are now many other plants following the almonds into flower.”

August was almond pollination season in the southern states of Australia. The two almond trees we have in our garden already have fruit on them, at least until the cockies cotton on to it, but in the natural order of things there are now many other plants following the almonds into flower. It highlights the importance of a diversity in flowering plants in the garden, an idea that has been promoted by bee activist and author, Doug Purdie, in books like “Backyard Bees”.

By contrast the monoculture farming techniques used up country creates Koyaanisqatsi of the highest order. These techniques offer bees rich sources of nectar for short periods, then nothing for the remainder of the year. Commercial production of almonds in the triangle between South Australia, NSW and north-west Victoria is a case in point and highlights the inherent dangers of these practices. It involves vast numbers of almond trees being grown artificially in a marginal landscape using lots of Murray River irrigation. Because there are few other trees in this area, truck-loads of bee hives are brought in from interstate every spring to assist in a pollination event which is is as surprising as it is unsustainable. Bees are brought from as far away as Queensland where worryingly a pest bee, the Asian Honey Bee, has recently been found. The Asian Honey Bee is believed to have been the original source of the parasitic mite, Varroa destructor which has caused so much damage to bee colonies around the planet. Australia remains one of the few places in the world where the destructor mite has not been seen but with the related Varroa jacobsoni already present on Asian honey bees around Townsville, the introduction of the destructor in the near future is now taken as a given. When that happens, it is farming practices like the almond pollination events of southern Australia that will make the spread of the mite across this island continent virtually unstoppable.

“Robbing a beehive”: harvesting bush honey in the early years of the 20th century, central Victoria. Photograph by Lindsay G Cumming, c1910, State Library Victoria.

The European bee so familiar to our gardens was introduced to Australia in 1822 and in the nectar rich regions of our flowering eucalypt forests it soon became firmly established. It is the heavy work horse of the pollination world, a typical hive containing about 80,000 bees. Native bees, of which there are about 2000 varieties, are by comparison smaller, generally solitary and produce less honey. To the early settlers with their peculiar idea of finders keepers, this great southern land where little bits of Europe seemed so easily to reinvent itself must have seemed like a land flowing with proverbial milk and honey. In due course it had to be admitted that the keepers weren’t the finders after all but while the milk comes in suburban cartons these days, at Yallambie the second part of that flow equation can be thought of as being quite literally true.

Bee boxes at the old Coghill home opposite the end of Jessop St, Greensborough, c1910, (Greensborough Historical Society picture).

2. “Dr. Godfrey Howitt’s garden” [sic]”. Source: State Library of Victoria.

Bees were probably kept in this area from the early days and in the second of the State Library’s c1856 daguerreotypes of Robert Bakewell’s garden, a rectangular shape in a lower corner may be evidence of a bee box positioned at that time on the Plenty River flats. If this interpretation could be proved to be correct, then in would put the Bakewells at the cutting edge of apiarist technology at that time since bee boxes with removable combs, as opposed to the more traditional skeps, were only perfected by Lorenzo Langstroth from an earlier design at the start of the 1850s.

Louisa Anne Meredith, (Allport Library and Museum of Fine Arts).

Peter Barrett in “The Immigrant Bees”, (Springwood, 1995) quotes from Louisa Anne Meredith’s book “My Home in Tasmania” and uses her book as evidence of the Merediths’ bee keeping activities in Van Diemen’s Land in the 1840s. So the sight of bee boxes at Yallambee during Louisa’s 1856 visit would not, by association, seem to have been so out of place.

The Tembys kept bees during their tenure at Yallambie in the second half of the 20^th century and a son of Ethel was still keeping bee boxes in Yallambie Park when we came to live here in the early 1990s. There were bees living inside a hollow oak in the Homestead garden at the time and I mentioned them to Ethel’s son, thinking they might be of use to him. “Yes, I can dispose of those feral bees,” he answered meaningfully. And so that was the end of that.

Bee box on the south lawn at Yallambie Homestead. Photograph from “Heidelberg Conservation Study, Part 1”, by Graeme Butler, 1985.

The bees are still in the oak and have now spread to an elm. They may have been the original source of the bees in our verandah. At this time of year the garden is literally buzzing with the busy little blighters. The Pride of Madeiras in our garden are in bloom and truly live up to their axiom, “the bee flowers”.

The “bee flowers” at Yallambie, September, 2016.

The above is about as good as I could manage with my simple point and shoot camera but it has been a good spring and there are plenty of other flowers in the garden around which the bees have been plying their trade. Some time ago my father in law turned up with a new lens on his camera and took the following series of photographs:

When seen up close in these pictures at a size not usually possible to our eyes, I like to wonder, ‘What goes on inside those little pin size heads?’ It’s all a question of scale and macro lens technology, but if you met one of these very alien looking little creatures up close, what sort of conversation might you have about their perspective on life? Do they know something we don’t know? Maybe you would find their space ships had been, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, “due to a terrible miscalculation of scale… accidentally swallowed by a small dog.”

“…but if you met one of these very alien looking little creatures up close, what sort of conversation might you have about their perspective on life?”

Bees are known to forage up to 8km from their hives, even without their space ships, so the bees centrally located here at Yallambie are potentially now at work across the entire length and breadth of the City of Banyule. The Council doesn’t have any special planning laws restricting bee keeping in the community, providing all activities remain in accordance with the Apiary Code of Practice which requires the owner of hives to provide a nearby water source and also limits the number of hives and their location within urban environments. Bless them. I wonder if it insists on drinking straws for the bees as well?

Australia is a huge producer of honey and we actually produce more honey than our population of 23 million can consume. At the same time however we import honey into this country on a large scale. Australian honey is very pure and is therefore a valuable commodity on the world market. Not surprisingly therefore, cheap foreign honey is imported for the locals while the best home grown produce goes overseas. Ask any New Zealander about the cost of dairy produce in their country and you will hear a similar tale told.

For all of the problematic future facing our bees, they remain an integral part of the eco-system and the single most important link in our industrial food chain. All our crops are heavily reliant on their pollinating efforts but bees have been around a long time and over the passage of millennia have witnessed many changes. Whether they survive the current climate of change reflects on the ability of mankind itself to survive. So plant something flowering today and give the bees a helping hand. A world without bees would be quite simply a world without.

The busy bees

You oughta be in pictures

Did you ever spend your time at school, when you should have been paying attention, drawing pictures of little stick men in the margins of your geography book designed to spring to life when you flicked back the edges of the pages? The equivalent today I suspect of surreptitiously watching episodes of Family Guy on an iPhone under the edges of a school table.

The art of the moving picture was widely practised in Australia from the earliest days of cinema. In the early 20^th century, Australian film in some respects rivalled the embryonic industry on the West Coast of the United States, very apt for a newly Federated Australia. In the century before, Australians had thought of themselves as Englishmen living abroad and spoke of going “home” to Great Britain. By Federation we were thinking of ourselves as first and foremost true blue “Aussies” but with our own special place within an Empire on which the sun never set. Historical drama with a local content was popular in Australia from the outset and the world’s first narrative feature film is believed to have been the 1906 “The Story of the Kelly Gang” which, pertinent to this story, was filmed at locations around the Heidelberg district, many of which would have been familiar to the residents of Yallambie at that time.

Charterisville in Ivanhoe, built by David Charteris McArthur, c1845.

These included the property Charterisville, leased at that time as a dairy farm by the family of the producer’s wife and located today in Burke Rd North, Ivanhoe; the Rosanna Station railway siding, where scenes of Kelly’s “last stand” at Glenrowan were filmed; and at nearby locations in both Eltham and Greensborough, where additional scenes were made.

Kelly’s last stand from the 1906 film, “The Story of the Kelly Gang”.

The film was a great success and made a fortune for its backers, sparking the outlaw as a subject of film genre and popular culture with the iron clad bushranger being subsequently portrayed on screen by a diverse range of alleged actors from the Australian Rules footballer Bob Chitty to Mick Jagger of rock and roll fame. In the words of the real Kelly as he faced the scaffold in 1880, “Such is life.”

The precise story of early film making in Australia is probably lost to history like the cellulose nitrate film stock on which it was recorded. It is known that Kooringarama Films shot a silent short feature in and around Eltham in 1928 called “Borrowed Plumes”. Kooringarama Films was an amateur company and followed up the following year with four reel, one hour feature, also shot in Eltham, called “As Ye Sow” which was shown to audiences in local halls around Melbourne with an incidental musical accompaniment delivered on a hand cranked gramophone.

Still from the short feature, “Borrowed Plumes” filmed in Eltham in 1928.

Three decades later Tim Burstall, an Eltham resident whose wife taught French at Eltham High School, made his first short feature “The Prize”. It was shot using an old clockwork camera of the type used in battle in the first world war mounted on a 1930s tripod from an Antarctic expedition. It portrayed a boy wandering through the bush in search of a lost goat and most of the locations used were in the vicinity of Eltham. The film won a bronze medal at the Venice Film Festival of 1960 with Burstall later going on to play a principle and “Purple” part in the reinvention of the Australian film industry in the 1970s.

Screen still of Heidelberg Park restyled as Somerset County Fairgrounds, from 2006 film, Charlotte’s Web, (Nickelodeon Movies).

Locations in and around the Heidelberg district continue to be used today in both film and television. The 2006 Nickelodeon production “Charlotte’s Web”, used locations around Heidelberg Park which was transformed for the purpose of the screen to resemble a fair ground in the mid-west of the United States. Similarly, the final episode of Series II of the “Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries” saw the artist colony “Montsalvat” in Eltham portrayed as a property in the so called “Australian Alps”. In the event and after the addition of a few dodgy special effects, that hang out looked oddly enough more like a castle hideaway in the Swiss Alps. A sort of Monsalvat on the Matterhorn.

Montsalvat in Eltham as seen in Episode 13 of Series 2 of the Miss Fisher Murder Mysteries, 2013, (Every Cloud Productions).

The process is not without the potential for problems all the same with the owners of a home featured in the 2013 movie “The Conjuring” reportedly suing Warner Bros for an unspecified amount over trespassers coming up to their home as a result of the film’s popularity.

Screen still of Banyule Homestead from Episode 3 of The Ex-PM, (CJZ, ABC TV).

Most recently in Heidelberg, Banyule Homestead has been seen in great detail on the small screen in Shaun Micallef’s amusing “The Ex-PM”, (which also features scenes shot in the surrounding area including one from the opening episode shot on Greensborough Rd, Watsonia), while Napier Waller’s Fairy Hills property continues to be portrayed as the Ballarat home and surgery of the titular character in the returning series, “The Doctor Blake Mysteries”. As ownership of Banyule Homestead changed hands a few months ago and the Waller home enjoys a peculiar rates agreement with local Council, perhaps the publicity isn’t seen as a problem at those properties.

Everyone with a camcorder or even an iPhone can be a film maker of sorts these days although, previously, home movies were limited to the lens sharpness and the sometime dubious technical skills of those fortunate enough to own 16mm or 8mm movie cameras. Yallambie itself was captured on film in a fascinating and previously discussed flick of this sort in the late 1950s, before the subdivision of the estate and while it was still operating as a farm. The 20 minutes of silent, 16mm colour moving picture was shot by Peter Basset-Smith, a professional film maker and friend of the of the last descendants of Thomas Wragge to live at Yallambie.

Bassett-Smith’s film stands alone today as a fascinating tribute to that now vanished era. A few years ago a former singing chum of my wife contacted us out of the blue with news that she had embarked on a career herself in film making. In fact, she was in the process of co-producing a low budget horror film with her son for which development was well underway. She too had been to Montsalvat to enquire about using that property as a location but was disappointed to learn that the fee asked by the trustees was almost more than her whole production budget.

“Hmmm, a horror story you say? I know just the place. It’s not quite Montsalvat or the Matterhorn but will suit your needs.”

So it was that the production crew came to Yallambie as our guests and spent a couple of days on location in the our garden shooting scenes for the movie “Killervision”, (21 Black Entertainment, 2014). It was great fun to be an observer of the process and I soon perceived the possibilities of the creative, almost addictive buzz that is a part of the film making business.

Character brandishing a piece of 4 by 2 in the garden at Yallambie, (Killervision film still).

Some of the action filmed at Yallambie required one of the actors to run through the garden screaming at the top of his lungs brandishing an ugly piece of 4 by 2, (in reality a lump of balsa wood). I wondered, probably too late, what the neighbours might think about this blood curdling racket and was rather perturbed at one point to hear police sirens in the distance. When those sirens came nearer and were obviously proceeding down Yallambie Rd I started to feel really concerned. I was standing next to a car at the time belonging to a member of the film crew and could see a set of (prosthetic) severed fingers oozing fake blood which had been left on the dash board. ‘How would I explain this to the cops?’ Thankfully it was a false alarm as the sirens proceeded further afield. Maybe the hamburgers from Maccas on Lower Plenty Rd were in danger of getting cold on their way back to the station.

On the soccer ground in Yallambie Park, (Killervision film still).

The movie, “Killervision” was eventually finished and sold to an international film distributor. The credit cards used were balanced and the actors were paid. We received a complimentary DVD copy of the movie and it was with amusement that I saw while viewing it later that the exterior of the Homestead appears very briefly and out of focus on screen where it is described as being a facility for the mentally disturbed.

Fictitious university prospectus featuring Homestead, (Killervision film still).

In a world being rapidly changed by the advent of new technologies, the art of the moving picture is no exception. Local cinemas were once to be found in many suburban venues around Melbourne but the multiplex venue has largely seen their demise. The Were Street, or Rotex Cinema in Montmorency with its purple curtains was one that I remember as a lad but there were earlier venues in both Burgundy St, Heidelberg and Upper Heidelberg Rd, Ivanhoe. A changing industry almost saw the death of the Australian film industry and certainly the closure of most independent suburban cinemas but a modern Renaissance, supported in large measure by Federal Government tax breaks, has seen the trend reversed. Hugo Weaving who has appeared in many Australian films of this later era as well as several international blockbusters was quoted from ABC television last week, saying that:

“This is a golden era of film-making in this country, we just don’t know that. I’ve been saying that for ages. I think our films are getting better and better, we [Australians] are just not going to see them.” (One Plus One, ABC TV)

Ol’ Elrond himself believes that the problem is basically selling the idea of Australia to a local market:

“We have an industry which is so slanted towards American films that it’s very, very hard for Australian films to get a look in.”

Ol’ Elrond himself.

It’s known as the “cultural cringe” and the problem is not a new one. The film makers involved in the “The Story of the Kelly Gang” in 1906 only realized the contribution to cinematic history they had made long after the fact, when it seems several of them jockeyed for credit of the initial concept.

On release of the 1959 Hollywood movie “On The Beach”, an American film that was shot in and around Melbourne about a world destroyed by nuclear holocaust, Ava Gardner is supposed to have said that Melbourne was “the perfect place to make a film about the end of the world.”

Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner filming the end of the world in Melbourne.

The story is almost certainly apocryphal. The quote appears to have been written by a Sydney journalist struggling to make deadline but it does illustrate all the same a very real and enduring inferiority complex that has always been a part of our way of looking at ourselves in this country. Meanwhile the Australian film industry continues to acquit itself on the global stage and not just with the export of Australian acting talent overseas. It has been said that to be born an Australian is to win the prize in the lottery of life. They call this the Lucky Country. It’s a pity we haven’t quite noticed it.