dwarfgoose

Photo John Karpik.

Chased from the park.

I live in a dead-end – at first it was only a street with the advantage of being near a park. But I soon realised this sweet pocket was a village. All the neighbours know each other. The first thing you hear in the morning is children laughing, mothers calling out ‘careful!’ and ‘Hold my hand!’, the tinkle of bicycles bells or the bark of a dog. Many of my neighbours have become friends and I have grown to love this tiny bit of Australia. Well, a lobby of community gardeners are menacing to pull out the concrete, cut off the bike path, erect high wire fences, build compost bins, sheds and dig 84 plots for their gardeners. In other words annex a beautiful piece of public land.

Norm Gallagher and Mick Lewis went to prison to stop the park from becoming a Kleenex factory. Fred Hardy was the one to get the unions involved and put a black ban on what was to become the Hardy Gallagher Reserve. To them, we owe this beautiful park that the people of Melbourne enjoy. Here is Nature AND Memory.  Community Gardens are grand when they beautify but not when they destroy what it already beautiful. Jane Garrett, former Mayor of the City of Yarra; now State member for Brunswick and Stephen Jolly councillor for the City of Yarra showed up at a rally organised by the Friends of Hardy-Gallagher Reserve on Australia Day. I never thought to say that about politicians but the proof of their common sense and humanity was in the pudding, right there, defending parkland for the people – for the 99%.

These gardeners have tried to take over public parkland for their private use for years. They have been pushed to the tail end of Fitzroy and Princess Hill until they butted into the shores of Brunswick last year. They are trying again in 2011 and 2012 after the 2010 public protest which was in all the newspapers.

Someone floating in the park.

Photo John Karpik of Jane Garret and Stephen Jolly at the rally.

I have been told that parks are not legally protected. If one can get enough residents to agree, one can make use of parkland in another way than listening to the wind in the trees, speaking to strangers under the wide open sky or picnicking on the grass a book sliding from lazy fingers; one can cut the trees, dig up the grass, put in wire fences and make a concentration camp for vegetables. The will of certain individuals, by playing with council boundaries and different wards, can prevail over the will of the people by making a land grab on public property.

The word community in community garden is misleading. Private plots and fences are not a community activity but a push for more private land. The drive behind the project is quite surprising. From where and what does this passion stem?

Gardens are very precious. They sometimes seem to be our last refuge. A guy called Robert Pogue Harrison wrote a book called Gardens. He speaks of ‘homeless gardens’. He says ‘gardens are to agriculture what poetry is to prose’ and that gardens ‘are not bound up with our our biological survival’. In other words, they are an expression of our soul. Homeless people go missing and let themselves die when their gardens are uprooted. These community gardeners are not homeless. Many of them live in Carlton and have gardens themselves. Another inconsistency: to be eligible for community gardening one must be a low income family and have no garden.

They suddenly reminded me more of farmers slicing up the land in defiance of Aboriginal traditional ownership. The two ways of life in balance then, still seem to be in balance now. One was about progress, property and power, the other was turned within. It is hard to hear Aboriginal philosophy, its whisper is lost in the louder trends of society. It speaks of other voices. It refers to our soul.

Visions in the park.

Walking in parks is its own reward. Parks are our Aboriginal Cathedrals, they can’t be cut up and sold into plots. They belong to all. The parks of Melbourne are the last remnants of that spirit which, ever so subtly, gives Australia its grandeur. The parks are the big garden of the people.