Melbourne freshwater individuals

Melbourne is full of freshwater individuals working hard to make a difference - you're not alone!

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Maya Ward - Eco-urban planner, writer & activist. The Long Yarra Walk, Merri Creek Walk. Click here to got to Maya's Story of the Sacred Kingfisher.

Freya Mathews - Ecological Philosopher & writer. Click here to visit Freya's website to view essays and poetry. Freya was one of the participants of a walk to find the headwaters of Merri Creek. I recommend her book "Journey to the Source".

Kate Whitehouse - Go to Kate's website about The Long Yarra Quilt & find out how you can get involved.

Archibald James (AJ) Campbell - "A Century Alike" & "Under Nature's Spell" (THE SOURCE, Melbourne Water website)

Aliey Ball - founder of freshwater.net.au & visual artist. Click here to find out about "Edgars Creek Narrative" Exhibition. Another work of interest is "Birrarung Yarra River Mapping" at the Malvern Library, High St Malvern.

The Story of the Sacred Kingfisher, by Maya Ward

Contents

Prologue

The Story of the Sacred Kingfisher

True spring

My first Kingfisher

High summer

City sundial

Moving home

Late summer

Swimming in the Yarra

Riding the city grid

Early winter

River of mists

Riding at night

Deep winter

Sailing across the bay

Carrying pails of milk and coals

Pre spring

Black cockatoos

Egret in the river rapids

The long merri walk

True spring returning

My number one tram/dolphins in the bay

The Source of the Yarra

Where I’ve come from

Epilogue

The Sacred Kingfisher returns

For the Finders

…Return with us, return to us,

be always coming home.

Ursula Le Guin

‘The Timelines Australia Project aims to encourage Australians to set aside the traditional European concept of four seasons and to appropriate local-based ecological and edaphic indicators to determine the true patterns and event sequences of the seasons for each locality. The traditional and ancient concept, at least 50,000 years in the making, is that the huge land mass and varying climates and bio-regions in Australia produce a range of different seasonal calendars.’

Alan Reid, President of the Gould League

Prologue

One day there was a bang on the window of the classroom at CERES Community Environment Park, and the children and teachers ran outside to see what it was. And there on the ground lay a tiny, very beautiful blue and white bird. They picked it up, and discovered that it was only stunned, as the bird woke up and flew off.

It was a Sacred Kingfisher, in Brunswick!

No one had seen a Sacred Kingfisher this close to the city on the Merri Creek for many years! And it was due to all the planting and cleaning up of the creek by the community that meant the Kingfisher, along with many other species, could live on the creek corridor again.

So now every November, there is a big party at CERES to celebrate the kingfisher’s return, when they arrive back to the Merri after their long migratory journey.

TRUE SPRING

Sacred Kingfishers return with the north winds

Grasslands and the suburbs that overlay them are in flower

Black Wattles end the peak wattle season

I rode off from the farmhouse in the warmth of the afternoon, wheeling round the curves of the river path, upstream to the Merri, where I peel off and up into the deep cut valley. To CERES, for the Return of the Sacred Kingfisher Festival.

The kingfishers have come back is the story they tell. I remember when this creek was nothing but weeds, when dad would drag us down to hoe out thistles with our heels. CERES didn’t exist then. But now, many years, weeding heels and planting hands later there are wattles and gums, tussock grasses and everlasting daisies, and a creek reclaimed from under the bodies of discarded cars.

The festival was crowds and children and something happening there in the middle, while I was chatting by the creek. And then darkness drew nearer and I walked inward amongst the dispersing audience and there found a fire. Ringing the fire were many I knew from working as a city tree planter. And they were dancing along with some white painted people, a strange little dance. I joined in, following the moves, learning the words, of the Kingfisher boogie. Night fell, people melted off home, but I stayed at the centre, dancing the Return of the Sacred Kingfisher.

When the drums eventually stopped, I got back on my bicycle and rode the full-moon lit path, down the Merri to Dights Falls, then onto the Yarra, downriver to home.

I wonder why it is called the ‘sacred’ kingfisher?

HIGH SUMMER

Long hot days, insects swarm on the waterways

Eucalypts crack out of their skins and shed their bark

No sun today, no telling time, no telling direction. No telling.

But when the sun is out, my place tells me of time and the wheeling year.

My place was made by map, not by land.

Surveyors sawed vast tracts into grid bits. Lines drawn north bound for distant Sydney. East west lines draft streets and lanes. The land was no resistor, a vast open plain.

They did not see the tracks that wove through rushes and reeds and grasses and trees that skirted slight rises and fell through valleys.

But the grid they made gives over it’s own sense.

Not a sense of this place as it once was, marked by creek and catchment. Yet this place still, longitude 38 south, latitude 145 degrees, this place a place (at the very least) by virtue of not being another.

I know it is midday when the bands made by light shining in the north window line up with the tile grid of the kitchen floor.

I know it is equinox when the sun will blind me if I set out westward at sunset. Only a week or two later and the sun will veer south after September, to wrap further and further around and, at the summer solstice, shine in the shadowside of this place, my block.

This city sundial has given me the sense of a sunflower, always grounded in orientation.

On the longest day of the year, on an endless golden evening, we moved house. We moved by canoe, from the middle Yarra to the top of the tidal region. We launched amongst White Poplar and Red Gum, where we sometimes swam, where the tiger snake sometimes swam with her rippling body curling through the water. We passed our local café, the Fairfield boathouse, we passed under the thunderous heartbreaking freeway; ducks passed us flying fast and low above their watery corridor. Masses of swallows darted wildly for insects, or took flying sips of river water.

I hear the Whirling Furphies song in my mind.

‘When I die, put me in a barrow

Roll me down to the banks of the Yarra

Dig a hole both deep and narrow

Bury me by my brown Yarra’

Bottles and polystyrene cups float along beside us. . .

Dights falls, haul the canoe overland around the dangerous rapids

Under Johnston St bridge

To the beautiful Grandfather Oak

To Collingwood Children’s Farm

To begin the journey of what it means to come home.

LATE SUMMER

In a good year, welcome storms break summer heat and dryness

Humans harvest summer crops and vegetable gardens

The open air cinema at Ivanhoe parklands was showing Moulin Rouge. We walked back along the river, in the cosysoft darkness of a hot night, on narrow slippy footpaths that wander amongst the tradascantia. Netti’s house high above is calling with rhythm and light, but we go down to the water’s edge, the rock ledge, to feel the slinky Yarra. And then suddenly we are in, flailing and squealing, we can only just stand on the sandy bottom, we circle and sing together. Then letting go to flow with the current, floating on our backs, the river reds not quite meeting; they reveal a strip of stars.

Netti says we could be in Kakadu.

But we are here, we are here in the suburbs of Melbourne, continuing the tradition of 40,000 years of dwelling in this place. I hold this knowledge tightly, dryly, with fear it may dissolve in fast forgetful waters.

Remembering lies on the far side of the river.

Hot windsun day – just past midday the shadows tell me.

My room, high and alone in the treetops, is a cabin that rattles in the wind. The eucalypts rub and nuzzle the metal roof, speaking like rigging, the leaves are whipping like a sail upfilling. Wattlebirds can cry like gulls. Nothing is still.

Where would I travel to if I let the wind take me?

I would speed away south to the city, through the city, away down to the bay my bicycle would ride the wind. And there on the beach I would see the little white sailboats spilling deeper south with spinnaker beaming, or tacking into the current of air, returning.

My journey would end at the bay, having no boat. But I got here, tacking through the grid of city streets. Voyaging south west under northwest winds is achieved spinnaker south, tack west, south, west, south, west, all the way to the sea. This body heaves on wind-made calves against the westerly vector. And this body sails, white clothes billowing south under the northerly, my shadow racing ahead as I ride.

Sun and city combine to tell me time and direction. They set my limits.

My body feels the wind. The wind mocks those limits.

EARLY WINTER

Misty mornings clear to beautiful still days

Birds are flocking – the migrants leave

Many days we would haul out the heavy blue canoe, to launch it at the bottom of the garden, beyond the Oak.

But there was only one day when we saw the cathedral.

Birrarung, River of Mists was the old name, the Wurundjeri name, for the Yarra. And the best mists were at this time of year, early mornings, when the days were so still and the nights began to chill.

This day the mist was rising in drifts, hiding and revealing the gums that leaned whitely over the river. It was when we paddled around the bend and the sun was behind us that we saw the mist take shape. Mist emerged from underwater in spiralling shafts, rising in twisting columns to about three metres before vanishing in the sunlight. We glided silently among these eerie, ethereal, ever-changing columns, drifting downstream in a daze. Floating with joy in an ephemeral construction built of light and vapour, and as we watched, it disintegrated with the rising of the day.

Birrarung is a name that is vanishing into the past.

Birrarung is a name that matters.

Riding at night

Silent and unseen, lightless

Along the bike path, a narrow strip of faintly glowing concrete

I cannot see rises or falls, hills or valleys, instead I feel them in my body, in my speed

I hear a faint rippling of the creek below, then smell it as the path dives low over rickety bridges.

I feel real darkness as the path veers through blackwood wattles.

Gossamer nets my face as I bring down nightly spider webs.

I feel wings sprout as I reach the crest and the moonlit valley opens up, and the city is beyond, far beyond, and I wonder how far there really is to go.

‘Is it safe?’ She asks me.

I don’t know how to answer.

DEEP WINTER

Common Froglet and Tawny Frogmouth inhabit the long dark nights

Cold longshadowed days

Sailing from St Kilda straight across Port Phillip Bay, to the narrow breach where the ocean pours in. Setting out on a clear windless winter morning, the bay is puddleflat, so we putter on the little motor.

As we lose sight of the city form, another, older form rose up, prominent from the vantage of the flatland of the bay. A ring of mountains appears, the boundaries of the catchment, the definers of our place, hidden to me all my life until this moment. My knowledgeable high country friend in the next boat shouts their names to me across the salt water; Mt Martha, the Yarra Ranges, the Black Spur, Mt Disappointment, Mt Macedon, the You Yangs.

The city is utterly gone, there is only the distant circlet of mountains, and the sky’s blue dome mirrored in the circle bay.

Seals are basking peacefully on an overcrowded buoy, piled up in the sunshine.

We are sailing to Queenscliffe, and the heritage listed colonial gaol where Australia was training the Bouganville army to suppress dissenters. There to climb fences, to be arrested and charged as trespassers.

There are many paths, and many journeys, to find justice.

____________________________________________

Riding to Dad’s place in Brunswick through Melbourne Cemetery. This place familiar since childhood is a vast openness in the inner city, a gentle dome of land with only an occasional grandiose cross or dolorous cypress to punctuate the skyline. From here I can see the vistas that the habitations of the living curtail, and I can see the wider religious landscape laid out. I see how the subtlety of landform was exploited, how slight rises become the centres of worship, as the steeples all around are revealed to me. And beyond them I see the distant mountains ringing Melbourne.

Were they there all the time?

Will it take a whole lifetime to learn to see this place?

When the escarpment began to blush with evening pinks I would know to set out. It was time to walk down the farm path to collect the provisions. In the dairy the shining steel milking pails were full of still frothy and warm pale yellow Guernsey milk from Bella or Regal.

Then to the barn where I would find a milking pail past its prime, to collect the coals from the fire which had been burning all day in the vast bluestone fireplace.

With a pail of milk and a pail of coals, walking back in the fading light over the footbridge, fast before the coals radiate too much heat. Home for the evening business of keeping ourselves warm and fed.

Then to carry pails of hot water for the dishes from the only hot tap across the courtyard. And then bucket back outside – greywater for the garden. We do this in memory of summers dryness.

We do this in memory.

PRE SPRING

Winds and rain are tinged with warmth and energy

Silver wattles begin the flowering time

Birds announce the dawn

Setting out from the farm, riding to my work at CERES on a cold dark day, I was amazed to see thirty or so Yellow Tailed Black Cockatoos in the deep wide Merri valley, flying between the bare Ash trees, flying between the branches of the fog.

Then two days later we heard them coming, flapping and screeching over the farmhouse. I ran after them to the back paddocks, where they settled in the eucalypts, above the golden wattles in bloom, in the sunshine on the far side of the river. But not for long, before they lifted off, wheeled, circled, and continued downriver.

I wonder how far they have travelled to be here?

And where did they go?

Riding to CERES on a bright windy morning, I get only as far as the rapids just beyond Johnston St bridge. There I brake at the sight of an ethereal creature, a large white egret, breeding plumage flowing like a wedding veil, immobile in the shallows. Elegantly poised, slender neck bearing a downcast head, bright eyes alert to the passing of fish. Leaning my bike against an ash tree, I slither quietly down to the riverbank, my gumbooted feet allowing me to continue on into the flow. Moving as the egret, she allows me to stand there. I stare as she does, but I stare at her, shining she is, backlit by the morning sun as it glints on the bubbling water, all around her is shimmering. Then saltwater flows from me as I cry with the surprise of this gift, this presence not half a mile from home.

For tomorrow I walk all the way to the headwaters, to find where this wildness all begins.

The Long Merri Walk;

From the mouth to the source of the Merri Merri.

On the first day, Freya, Maya and Cinnamon walked from Collingwood Children’s Farm to Coburg Lake.

Six hundred students from creekside schools joined us to help us spot the first Sacred Kingfishers of the season along this urban waterway.

On the second day we walked from Coburg Lake to Campbellfield.

And by the end of the day we had walked out of the city, and reached a vast grassy valley with one ancient river red gum draped over the creek; Black Shouldered Kite hunting, hovering overhead.

On the third day we walked from Campbellfield to Craigieburn.

To Galada Tabore the gorgeous gorge, and the first swim in the Merri!

On the fourth day we walked from Craigieburn to Donnybrook.

The openness of this land reveals our distant destination, steadily we approach the hills along a water-ribboned waterway.

On the fifth day we walked from Donnybrook to Woodstock.

Piles of granite boulders reveal why the first inhabitants named this Rocky Creek. Falcon clutches her lunch of blue wren as she flies low above our lunchtime perch.

On the sixth day we walked from Woodstock to Wallan East.

Walking through wide open paddocks in pouring rain, or sheltering under the occasional bridge, slowly we rise to the first foothills.

On the seventh day we walked from Wallan East to the ridgeline of the Great Dividing Range.And found that the source of the Merri is a place as beautiful as can be dreamed. A dear little trickle winds amongst deep dense gullies, through a forest of Blackwoods and Manna gums, below us is a carpet of orchids.

And as we walked I think I found where the wildness begins.

To the uncountable who have walked and loved and storied and sung this creek for thousands of years; may we walk in your footsteps.

TRUE SPRING RETURNING

Sacred Kingfishers return with the north winds

Grasslands and the suburbs that overlay them are in flower

Black Wattles end the peak wattle season

The number one tram has been there from the beginning, laying out a silver track that led to home. From the front door of mum’s house, near the beach in Albert Park, I could see it; from dad’s garden in Brunswick I could see it. My shuttling room, my very own; my public room, from one house to the other.

Honey coloured slatted wooden seats, elegant windows with shutters to pull up against summer sun, slatted wooden floors that would collect rain that ran from winter umbrellas.

A moving room with no doors!

And when golden evening sunlight spilled in as we trundled through St Vincent’s Gardens, the most beautiful room in the world.

In New Orleans, last stop at the end of a very long year away, I was walking along the Mississippi, the thick warm wet fog fast rolling in. And there, out of the mist, comes my tram. My very own W class tram comes trundling towards me. I sat on the banks of the Mississippi and cried and cried. A young man found me, I tried to explain. ‘They’ve sold my home, it will not be there for me when I get back.’

‘It’s only a streetcar’ he said. He could never have understood my desire was for my home, my city, to be safe in its everyday beauty.

Now they are almost all gone, the old trams. I swore I would leave Melbourne never to come back the day they took away the trams. But it is not easy to be so romantic or so pure.

Last night, at Albert Park beach, where the stark, slick new number one tram terminates, I stood on the sand and scanned the bay, as I have done so very many times before. But this time it was different. Never once in twenty years of summer swims and winter walks, never this! Dolphins were leaping at Albert Park beach! I tore into the bay, to be there, amongst them.

But they are fast, and elusive, and swam out of sight.

Beauty, in many forms, elusive.

My home, changing. Receiving and losing. Giving and grieving.

My Albert Park home with its backyard a forest of eucalypts (home for honeyeaters, wattlebirds, a boobook owl), gone now under yuppie apartments.

It’s only a streetcar…

To the headwaters!

It will be many weeks of winding walking

but one day I will find myself there

drinking cold clear water

at the source,

deep in the tall ash forests

in the mountains of the Great Divide.

Where the Yarra begins.

The journey to walk the length of the Yarra, to follow every bend of Birrarung, the river of mists, will begin at rivers end, at Williamstown. I will leave the bay, mirror flat and hazy in the dawn of a summer’s day, to the cries of seagulls, the place to remember the sea eagles.

And so through the docks, and whatever that land is becoming. It was here we explored dingy backwaters as kids– the Allens factory (where Southbank is now), those wonderfully curved corrugated wharf buildings, those trees that dad once secretly planted along the river - our secret public trees - gone years ago.

Just here, where there was once a waterfall, where the creek (that is now Elizabeth Street) joined the Yarra, just around here on that 1830’s map was the ‘track to the beach’, through musky smelling tea tree scrub. Round about where city road is now.

I reckon it’ll be a long day’s hike, but I’ll get to my beautiful once-upon-a –time home, Collingwood Children’s Farm near dights falls, for that first night.

Tawny Frogmouth will be there to welcome me, that slow deep pulse resounding through the darkness. May he be revealed in his eucalypt as the full moon rises over the escarpment.

I’ve come from a world of books, about thick lush green woods, and pale delicate fairies, wild strawberries and benevolent bunnies. A whole world of books, where I walked through landscapes of bursting spring, sweet summer, golden autumn and snowy winter.

Oak, ash, elm, rowan, elderflower, apple.

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme.

I lived mainly in this pretty place, occasionally emerging into this world – of sun that blistered, bush where trees were just some gum or another, flowers unnameable and therefore invisible. The ones I knew were weeds and somehow evil; blackberry, fennel, thistle.

Then at 22 I went to Europe. And for the first time in my life, I came home. I could name and so knew this landscape. I worked as a farmer, with peasants, where weeds became herbs, tonics, or food. I could eat of this land. I would forage happily, gratefully I became a creature in her rightful place.

But winter came.

I went numb, my heart froze over.

I was missing something.

I was missing those gum trees.

And so I learned what I needed to do. To learn to be at home in my birth place. To know my part of Australia the way I felt I knew Europe.

To follow the forms of the landscape, to call to the birds, to speak to the trees.

This autumn I harvested with a person of this land. I was waist deep with a Wurundjeri man in a dam, in the Latrobe Uni wetlands, cutting cumbungi to roast the stems over hot coals. In that place of 500 year old redgums, on that day, I ate sugar ants, club rush corms, wattle seeds, lerp. I could name the birds and sang with them. And I listened to the stories of a Wurundjeri man and his ancestors.

Him and me, waist deep in a dam, in the hot sun, for an endless, endlessly happy day.

I am starting to come home.

Epilogue

Once upon a time, in a southerly land between mountains and bay, was the land of the Kulin, where the Wurundjeri lived. Their ancestors, Bunjil the Wedge Tailed Eagle and Branbeal the rainbow had created this land, and the people sang the songs to sustain the land, to thank the ancestors for creating this bountiful world. And when the people died, the Sacred Kingfisher in her clothes of sky and cloud flew away at the end of summer with the people’s spirit into the sky, while their body and soul returned to the earth. And in spring the Sacred Kingfisher returned, to nest and rest, to feed and breed on the banks of the Merri Merri , while the Wurundjeri harvested eels and blackfish, cumbungi and water ribbons.

But then one day strangers came to the land of the Kulin, who did not know lore or right behavior. The strangers stole the land from the Wurundjeri, and banished them to beyond the mountains. But the Wurundjeri walked back over the mountains, and so when the strangers had been in the land for many generations, and were starting to open their eyes and unblock their ears, to see and hear of the wrongs they had caused, the Wurundjeri were there with the stories of how this land came to be.

And so, after many many years unspoken, together the Wurundjeri and the strangers retold the story of Bunjil and Branbeal, and of how Waa the crow created a whirlwind to take them into the sky, so that they could view their creation. The people who were no longer strangers sang the song calling Branbeal to bring colour to the world. But she only comes after rain, so when the drenched singers had dried themselves, Branbeal the rainbow arced over the Village Green.

I know why she is called the Sacred Kingfisher.

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