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    Journey to the Source of the Merri
    Journey to the Source of the Merri
    Journey to the Source of the Merri
    Ebook66 pages1 hour

    Journey to the Source of the Merri

    By Freya Mathews

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    About this ebook

    On a sunny October morning in 1999, three friends set off to find the source of their local creek, the Merri. Starting where the Merri joins the Yarra River, they followed the watercourse through city, suburbs, outer industrial wastelands, farmscapes and the foothills of the Great Divide. Temples, goddesses, medieval churches, sacred birds, sanctua
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDebbie Lee
    Release dateMay 22, 2015
    ISBN9781740279475
    Journey to the Source of the Merri

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      Book preview

      Journey to the Source of the Merri - Freya Mathews

      Journey to the Source of the Merri

      Have you ever had an experience but still, at the end, been unable fully to imagine it, to hold it, all in one piece, in your imagination – to grasp what has happened to you? This is how I felt after my pilgrimage to the headwaters of the Merri Creek. Memories of the separate days of the journey were fresh, but the poetic significance of the journey as a whole eluded me, even as I burned, bright as a biblical bush, with its after-light.

      Where did it begin? Where does any pilgrimage begin? At the dawn of personal time, I suppose, in earliest life, in those one or two images which, as Albert Camus put it, first open childhood’s heart. Creeks were already charged with this kind of primal significance for me. A small creek without a name had wound through the back of the farmlet on which I was raised. I had no idea where it came from or where it went, but it was always full of news from upstream, especially after heavy rains, when inflated carcasses of sheep and other animals would float past or pile up against the barbed wires that were here and there strung across its course. These tidings from places that were entirely unknown to me, yet to which I felt mysteriously connected as part of the wider world that the creek created for me, were always tremendously exciting, and I was even more thrilled when the creek would ‘break its banks’ (how I loved that expression!), and rise up to cover the bottom of our paddocks. What a cold but exhilarating elementalism I felt when I paddled, sometimes up to my knees, in that muddy water that the creek had laid, against the accepted order of things, under fences and gates and across pastures, making the familiar landscape strange.

      Of course, it was not long before this elementalism was taken in hand, and the bed of the creek bulldozed out and straightened. Although I was only seven years old at the time, I know I was shocked at the effects of this bulldozing, transforming the creek from easy-going meanderer, so at home in its well-worn, overgrown channel, to raw clay excavation, straight-sided and steep. Still, the billy buttons and watercress grew back, the tadpoles and cranes returned – though there were no more rumours of eels after that – and the creek continued to bring gossip from upstream, and even to break its banks from time to time. My fascinated love for it continued unabated. The creek was not like a paddock or rock or other land form – it did things, it told things, it was busy and talkative and full of surprises. It was, above all, companionable.¹

      After my family moved from this rural fringe of outer suburbia to Carlton North in inner Melbourne, that rural area was rezoned heavy industrial, and the creek channel was fully ‘upgraded’ into a concrete drain. No more watercress and billy buttons now. My attention, however, was by this time turning from creeks to other things, and it was not long before I had relocated to London. I remained there for ten years, with nothing but a distant, rarely glimpsed Thames for fluvial company. (I remember, however, my sense of enchantment when I obtained a map of the old Thames river system. Most of the tributaries in the inner London catchment still existed but had been converted into underground sewers. Some of the streets still bore the names of the waterways they had supplanted. Fleet Street, for instance, followed the course of the old River Fleet.)

      It was not until I was in my late twenties that I returned to Melbourne, and settled in inner-city Brunswick East, not far from the family home which was still in Carlton North.

      That was twenty years ago. It was a couple of years later, when we acquired our first dog, that I really discovered the Merri Creek, which formed the eastern boundary of the municipality. My early memories of this urban creek are blurred. It grew into my consciousness gradually, imperceptibly, as I walked our mad bull terrier along its banks and watched the transformations occurring there. From an utterly degraded and neglected little gutter, winding past the backs of factories and under flyovers, choked with fennel and blackberry, it was returning to life. Under the auspices of its friends (Friends of the Merri Creek) and its heroic committee (the Merri Creek Management Committee), which was coordinating the efforts of local councils and community groups to revegetate the urban reaches, native trees and shrubs were reappearing, and with them the native birds, long since driven from their old grounds, were coming home.

      Gradually, a bicycle path was laid, from the mouth of the creek at the Yarra River to the lake at Coburg, and eventually right through to the outer northern suburbs. At the same time, as factories looked for cheaper real estate on the edge of town, community projects moved in on the scraps of degraded ‘waste land’ the factories left behind. An amazingly colourful landscape started to cohere along the banks. Walkers and riders on the bike path were greeted by the windmills and African grass hut rooftops of CERES (the environment park in Brunswick East), the Aboriginal flag of the Caring Place, and the gold spires and domes of the Russian Orthodox church, which the parishioners were building with their own hands over many years. There was an old market garden, still under cultivation,

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