Jenny Sinclair
Australia is being set up
NB: This is an unpublished piece written in late 2021; publishing it here in response to the May 2022 announcement of the Liberal Party's willingness to consider nuclear power (https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/jun/06/peter-dutton-says-hes-not-afraid-of-nuclear-debate-after-advocate-named-shadow-energy-minister)
I have not edited it for changes in the government since then.
Australia is being set up.
The signs are subtle, but they’re there. The government is getting ready to push for domestic nuclear power generation.
The submarines are only the start. Sure, we were assured that having nuclear submarines did not mean we’d have more nuclear facilities in Australia.
But it looks like we’re going to get them anyway.
There is no national “let’s talk about this,” just a series of small moves, like a chess game where by the time it’s two moves to checkmate, it’s too late.
Australia does have a nuclear capacity, overseen by the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation, for scientific research purposes.
Not long after our nuclear subs deal was announced, we got a new minister for science, Melissa Price. Price is also the minister for the defence industry. At the time, Scott Morrison said the twin responsibilities would complement each other “very significantly.”
“There is also the working together with organisations like ANSTO and the CSIRO in addressing nuclear capabilities that will be necessary under the nuclear submarine program,” Morrison said.
In July last year, a research paper published on Federal Parliament’s website helpfully pointed out that “Australia holds almost one-third of the world’s proven uranium reserves, which has underpinned exports of around 7,000 tonnes per year.”
The report discusses options for plants, right down to possible locations, without making a recommendation either way. Just, you know, putting it out there…
Mining giant BHP has joined the nuclear party, with its vice-president for climate change and sustainability, Fiona Wild, saying nuclear was a “great opportunity” for Australia.
“Nuclear power can play a significant role in providing low greenhouse gas emissions power but there are issues associated with it,” she told a conference in October. Have I mentioned that BHP mine uranium?
Also in October, the Minerals Council of Australia issued a report breathlessly extolling “an evolution of nuclear power generation technologies” known as small modular reactors (SMRs).”
“Now that Australia has committed to building nuclear-powered submarines, Australia will need to develop the skills and expertise to support the new fleet. This capacity could also support the deployment of SMRs.”
The report uses the word “safe” 24 times. It mentions “waste” 19 times, but mostly next to the word “less” and never explaining where that waste will go.
Maybe that’s because, as the report to Parliament notes, “negative perceptions towards nuclear power, especially around the safety of waste and the possibility that an accident could release radiation into the environment, also persist in Australia.”
That, I presume, is why we have two separate laws – not policies, laws – against “the approval, licensing, construction, or operation of a nuclear fuel fabrication plant; a nuclear power plant; an enrichment plant; or a reprocessing facility,” as the parliamentary report points out.
Meanwhile, the prime minister has committed to zero net greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, with zero specifics on how we’ll get there.
The Minerals Council – surprise, surprise – says nuclear can help with that. No mention of two-headed cows or half-lives though.
The pieces are being moved into place stealthily. Unless one of the government’s technology bets pay off big time, Australia may be heading for a position where the only way we can decarbonise is to build reactors and dig more uranium out of the ground.
That would make the Minerals Council of Australia very, very happy. But perhaps someone should ask the rest of us first?
#
Links/sources:
Report to Parliament: https://www.aph.gov.au/About_Parliament/Parliamentary_Departments/Parliamentary_Library/pubs/rp/rp2021/AustralianElectricityOptionsNuclear
Guardian:
Fiona Wild quotes: https://www.afr.com/policy/energy-and-climate/australia-can-t-ignore-nuclear-in-race-to-net-zero-bhp-20211011-p58ywu
Minerals Council of Australia report: https://www.minerals.org.au/sites/default/files/Small%20Modular%20Reactors%20in%20the%20Australian%20Context%202021.pdf
Background reading: https://reneweconomy.com.au/small-nuclear-reactors-huge-costs/
BHP uranium: https://www.bhp.com/what-we-do/global-locations/australia/south-australia-olympic-dam
Older work: John F. Kennedy is very surprised
John F. Kennedy is Very Surprised. Jenny Sinclair
It’s Resurrection Day. God is making good on His promises. All over the world, graves are opening, shrouds are unwrapping and scattered ashes are flying together on the four winds, assembling themselves into whole bodies like so much Instant Humanity (Just add water! See limbs form before your very eyes!)
The old are still old and the halt and disfigured are still slow and ugly of course, and there are others who need a little, shall we say, nip and tuck? The victims of torture, of car crashes, of dismemberment, of slow deaths in the desert (including, natch, the crucifixees), come back looking a little better than they did at the exact moment of their demise. Gives them a fair chance in the post-Resurrection world.
And what a world it’s shaping up to be. The living haven’t quite got their heads around it yet. They tried to kill the first few bodies coming out of the graveyard gates – too many zombie movies, I suppose – what a laugh that was! Murder, in the post-death age!
So far – and it’s only been ten hours – the truly religious are taking it best. The very old churchgoing ladies weren’t all that surprised to wake from their afternoon dozes to find Fred or George or Henry in the other chair, waiting for a cup of tea.
The devout and suffering mothers of the poor countries of the world turned from their baking or their weaving and ran into the arms of their formerly dead children, little boys and girls who came home to their mothers carrying their even smaller baby brothers and sisters. They’re not asking any questions.
The Archbishop of Sydney, however, is having some difficulty. The Second Coming began at 3pm, Australian Eastern Standard Time (adjusted for daylight savings). Now it’s 1am on January the fourth, he’s fronting a press conference bigger than any congregation he ever managed to pull, and he’s not doing so well.
‘Archbishop, do you believe this is God’s work? Is it a miracle, or a trick of the Devil?’
“Suzanne Pretty,” he thinks. That bitch. Normally she’s a political correspondent, only bothering him when topics like abortion and paedophilia arise in the national debate. But this is one hell of a story and the respectful religion writers have been pushed aside by the gimlet glass and steel eyes of the TV camera and boom mike crowd.
‘It’s too early to tell…’ he begins.
‘Hasn’t God spoken to His church?’, calls out the 7.30 Report’s hound, seated front and centre. ‘What does that suggest to you, Archbishop?’
‘God does not normally speak directly to His ministers,’ Archbishop Bell begins. ‘Through His works He…’
‘Oh come on,’ interrupts The Australian’s disaster and terrorism specialist. ‘We can’t talk about normal life while every member of the First Fleet is standing on Circular Quay, can we? Is this one of His works or not?’
‘What about the abortions?’, jumps in The Herald’s health correspondent. ‘Can you comment on the fact that Westmead Hospital is only seeing babies past twenty-one weeks’ gestation in its birthing unit?’
But Bell’s not listening. His father has just walked into the room, followed by his grandfather and grandmother, and they’re pushing through the media pack towards him. They look like they’d like a word.
‘I’m sorry, I’ll have to end this conference now,’ he hardly has time to say, providing the cameras with a classic turn-pale-cut-and-run grab that the newsroom editors entirely misinterpret and use out of context, as usual.
By 3am Sydney time, everyone in the world – and that’s quite a lot of people now – is awake, apart from the very small babies. There are an awful lot of those, too, particularly in Africa, South America and Asia. China, for instance, is suffering what can only be called an embarrassment of baby girls.
In Ballarat, Victoria, the Slattery family is having a reunion of sorts. Six generations of Slatterys have been born in Australia since Frederick and Eustace arrived in 1862. With the various Thompsons, Smiths, Loaders and Murphys who fed the family tree along the way, there are now 127 people in Karen Slattery’s three-bedroom brick veneer home. Most of them want to watch the CNN news on cable, so she’s moved the box outside. A few, though, are being difficult.
‘Hello? Hello, can you hear me in there? Would you PLEASE unlock the door? Hello?’ Karen Slattery yells and bangs, but the bedroom door stays shut.
Inside, Paul Murphy and Tamsin Murphy, nee Slattery, killed together in a train smash on their honeymoon in 1922, are going at it hammer and tongs for only the third time ever. As you would expect after an eighty-three year dry spell. Sadly for them, their efforts to use their shiny new bodies to expand the Slattery clan will be in vain.
That’s the deal: the dead come back, but no new souls will be handed out. It seems unfair, but even the already pregnant are bound by the five-month rule.
In New York, several large publishers and event organisers have just cottoned on to the comeback potential of the Second Coming. Ziggy Green is pacing his velvet-floored eyrie, knocking back whisky like there’s no tomorrow – or at least not one that includes death by cirrhosis of the liver.
‘Hemingway!’ he’s shouting. ‘Find me Hemingway! And Chandler if you can.’ He stops and slaps his forehead. ‘WILLIAM BLOODY SHAKESPEARE.’ The ears of his agent in Europe ring like a bell.
Across the continent, Martin Sorvino, head of MaxiLab Films, is having similar thoughts.
‘Fuckin’ Tolkien, I said! Yes I know he was an academic for fuck’s sake. But Peter Jackson thinks if we can just get him to a screening room, we might get a sequel out of him. No, forget Monroe. She was washed up anyway. Leave her to the tabloids. Yes, River Phoenix, if you can get him straight.’
Back in New York, John Lennon and Yoko Ono are watching snowflakes fall on Strawberry Fields.
In Vienna, it’s just after 5pm. Albert Einstein is having a quiet coffee with Stephen Hawking, nutting out a few adjustments to a theory or two.
In Rome, John Paul II wonders how long he’s been napping and whether he’s got the energy to shuffle out to the balcony yet again. Really, he thinks, isn’t it time for me to meet my maker?
God is saying nothing. He’s not making it any easier for His servants and ministers, from Mecca to Salt Lake City. But why should He? The mothers of Somalia and Sri Lanka understand. He took in silence and now He’s giving back in the same way.
The President of the United States is doing the numbers and is worried. Four hundred years of the immigrant USA versus tens of thousands of years of the Indian nations. He doesn’t know where to start until an aide comes into the room carrying the W-phone.
‘Prime Minister of New Zealand, sir.’
‘Not now, for God’s sake.’
‘Sir, she says you might like to hear about their treaty? Signed in 1840? She says it’s turned out surprisingly useful.’
He sighs, and picks up.
Jesus Christ, meanwhile, got as far from Jerusalem as the UN staff car He flagged down could carry Him before the gas ran out. Then He started walking.
Did they believe Him when He told them who He was? Hell yes. He just sort of has this way of talking, you know? Like He’s for real?
Now he’s in a farmhouse on the side of a hill in southern Italy. The 1000 or so residents were pretty pleased to have Him, seeing as the farm could normally only support seventy to eighty people. He’ll come in handy, and they didn’t even mind Him asking for a room of His own; one big enough to share with His mates Buddha and Mohammed when they arrive on Friday.
Every Italian family needs a Papa; what it doesn’t need is forty-six of them. The current Papa remains in charge only because he’s the one who knows how to use the Internet; the rest are still working out the telephone and light switches) shows Jesus to His room, the one with the south-facing terrace.
He shows Jesus how to work the dodgy window latch, and where the towels are kept. Just before he leaves, he dares to ask: “So, what now for us all?’
Jesus shrugs, not unkindly. ‘Life, Papa, is what you make it. Eternal life’s no different.’
And He sits down on the whitewashed stone bench in the sunshine to watch the teeming masses on the plain below.
Science suppression: Overland magazine online
You can't go home again
Older work: I love the Melways (from Much Ado About Melbourne)
Officeworks Fitzroy, Saturday, 25/7/2009: a stack of 2010 Melway street directories are displayed near the checkout. Two young men are behind me in the queue.
One says: “I like a Melways.”
The other says: “Smell it.”
The first, tapping the cover: “As long as I’m in the red section, I’m OK.”
I love the Melways. And I’m not the only one. I don’t know if any other city has quite such an intimate relationship with a map as Melbourne has with the Melways, but I doubt it.
Like the land beneath our feet, we take it for granted. A Melways reference is a routine inclusion in children’s party invitations, rally flyers, Web sites for cafes. Even the qualifier “Melways reference” is a little redundant; if I say “30 J11”, you will find me.
Much has been made of the London Underground map, literally – T-shirts, coffee cups, tea towels all bear the snaking multicoloured lines of the stylised train system. But Melbourne, in its Victorian reserve, hasn’t done the same for the Melways. And how could you? Where the Underground logo is a stripped-down piece of graphic design - information over representation - the Melways goes the other way. It seeks to show as much as possible of what is on the ground.
Ref: 2B E9: Here you’ll find, in four square centimetres of paper: Lincoln Square, the paths across Lincoln Square, the fountain in Lincoln Square, the roads Lincoln Square South and Lincoln Square North, Swanston Street, tram stop #3 of the lines 1,3,15,21 and 22, the Townhouse Hotel, Pelham Street, Pelham Place, the Canada Hotel, Canada Lane, a public toilet block and assorted street numbers. Admittedly, Map 2B is one of the high-detail, large-scale “red maps”, but it’s still less detailed than the CBD map 1A/1B, which names almost every building and all but shows the commuters marching down Collins St at 5pm.
The Melways is not a single iconic object, like the Underground or the Opera House. Like Melbourne, its charm is in the overall effect; the cohesion of the whole.
On the Melways Web site (the company now calls itself Ausway), there is a link labelled “history”. It gave me a childish delight to find that the Melways was first published in May, 1966, the month I was born. Melways Edition #1 – the city as it was when I was born – is reproduced in its entirety on the site.
The first thing I notice is how much less complex it – the map – is. Roads, parks and railways are the main features. There is a lot of white space. At 47 C8 I find the Box Hill and District Hospital. In 44 years the once-empty spaces around it have filled up with bus route numbers, tiny little crosses and bicycles. Telephone symbols have appeared, but the grid reference, the place, remains the same.
I peer at the old map, half-expecting to see a miniscule version of my baby self.
A lot has happened to me, and the city, since then.
Leafing through Melways Edition # 23 (1995), I find forgotten places flattened onto the page. Places like the Frankston Hospital’s emergency room (Ref: 100A F11), to which I was summoned by an early morning phone call one awful Sunday in 1997. My partner, rising even earlier for a ride with friends, had been knocked off his bike by a car. When I left the house in Collingwood (Ref: 2C F5) that morning, wearing the clothes I’d thrown off the night before, I took with me three things: my wallet, my then partner’s 16-year-old daughter and the Melways, which sat on my lap, guiding me as I drove down the Nepean Highway (Highway 3), not knowing whether the love of my life would still be alive when I reached him.
And there’s Frankston beach, the yellow centimetre of sand (Ref: 100A A7) where I sat and stared out at the bay when I just had to get away from the beeping machines, the bloodied linen, the thought of the grim and uncertain weeks ahead.
Grabbing a handful of pages, I turn at random to map 196: Anglesea, a sleepy river-mouth town on the coast just past Geelong. Here’s the long steep dune-shaped hill (Ref: 196 E9) that I rode up one day in 1993 just to roll back down it, on a cyclist’s high after riding 60 ks along the Great Ocean Road; here’s a little orange rectangle denoting the shops where we always stopped for fish and chips on school bus trips down from Ballarat; here’s Point Roadknight, jutting out into the uniformly blue ocean.
Though I was born in Melbourne, I didn’t grow up here; for 18 years, I lived out in a country town. When I returned, too poor to have a car, and too impatient to wait for public transport, I got a bike. I quickly learned that in a sprawling, confusing new city it was worth carrying the entire one-and-a-bit kilogram Melways with me, up and down every hill.
My first real job required me to “write up” six or seven houses for a newspaper’s real estate pages every week, and this was how I learned Melbourne; plotting routes from point to point, learning a shortcut along a railway line one week, the inadvisability of a busy road another. Even now, it makes me a little anxious to find myself out in the car without the Melways.
There’s so much in this book. I don’t know where to start.
The title on the cover, embedded in a speedy-looking red arrow, declares it to be a “Melway”, but no one who lives in Melbourne calls it that. Only an outsider would say “I looked it up in the Melway”. It’s a Melways.
So, the Melways, Edition 23, 1995. The Melways dices my town into blue-edged blocks; each double page map is ten kilometres across and six kilometres high. The individual grid references each cover a piece of land 250 by 250 metres.
Large capital letters on the cover proclaim it to be a directory of “Greater Melbourne”. The greatness of Melbourne had, by 1995, expanded to include the holiday destinations favoured by Melbourne people. Map 533-534 is a jigsawed version of Phillip Island, dissected and shuffled in order to fit the most populated areas onto the page. At Map 534, G6, I find School Road, the Newhaven Primary School, a tennis court, a shop and a playground.
For places like this, the map is inadequate. Here is a reference point of my childhood, my father’s father’s house, gone, a double row of plum trees behind it, gone, a filthy asbestos-sheet bungalow, gone, a rusty iron tankstand under which my brothers and I washed off every grain of Newhaven beach sand before we were allowed anywhere near the house: gone.
Newhaven Primary School was always closed when we stayed at the house on School Road; the playground and the concealing thick clumps of banksia were at our disposal: all gone.
No map could ever, anyway, have represented the tent my parents set up in the backyard of Pa’s house every summer, or the razor-beaked magpie that flew down, tame as a budgie, to perch on Pa’s shoulder and eat strips of raw meat from his retired-butcher’s hands. These things come and go: maps pretend to permanence.
Greater Melbourne. To look at the latest Melways I have (Edition 34, 2007), you’d think that Melbourne had expanded right across the nation. Here’s Adelaide, Ballarat, Geelong. These are the “green maps”, so-called touring maps of Victoria and the adjacent parts of New South Wales and South Australia. If you can drive there from Melbourne, it’s here.
This is more than just Melbourne, but the message is: these are places you visit. One tours out of Melbourne. One always returns.
There is a soothing kind of certainty to the Melways.
When I am lost on some interminable outer-suburban road – Springvale Road, say, more than 40 kilometres from north to southern end, I can pull back, find my place in the key maps. The key maps, pointedly located at the very front of the book – “read this first” - give context, perspective, a picture of how one blue square fits into the next.
The city, seen from this height – the main key map is on a scale of 1:400000, as if the viewer were kilometres above the Earth – has a venous quality. It’s a long-legged spider, an unsteady crab, pincers of black highway and freeway reaching down and encircling Port Phillip Bay. Where the land is flat, the roads run straight, but out in the hills they quiver and twist with the effort of traversing the irregular landscape; down on the Mornington Peninsula they relax and meander among orchards, vineyards and streams.
The vast empty space of the bay seems to emphasise the way all roads lead to that point, at its crown, where the Yarra flows in; where the colonisers started building their roads, reaching out and out. At the edges of the main key map, small red arrows point out and away: To Leongatha, To Warburton, To Bendigo. To The Rest Of The World. To That Which Is Not Melbourne.
The more I contemplate the Melways, the greater an affection I feel for it; for the meticulous colour coding of the maps’ margins (among my generation X friends, an address on the “red maps” has long been a sign of a life well lived); its scattering of place names that ring like found poetry, laden with personal meaning and family history: Parkville, Richmond, Carlton, Fitzroy, Clifton Hill, Collingwood, Caulfield, Kew, Northcote, Mt Waverley, Upwey, Elwood, Beaumaris – for each, I have a story.
I love the detail, the earnest effort to write the unwritable, to pin a city down on paper. It’s as if the Melways’ makers assume nothing: they are designing and writing for an alien, putting in everything that they think matters. In little-used sections at the back, the Melways carries lists of features of interest and of necessity for the resident and visitor: theatre restaurants, wineries, “topographic features”, six and a half five-column, ten-point pages of public open spaces. How very Melbourne. Churches, mosques, synagogues, and “other places of worship” are jumbled in together.
And there are the streets: 148 pages of names, from Aarensen Court, Montmorency (Ref: 21E6), through to Zulu Retreat (I am not making this up! Ref: 13, H6.)
Early on in Melbourne’s history, streets were given heavy names, worthy of posterity, borrowed from kings and queens and civic figures. The city grid, read from south to north: King, William, Queen, Elizabeth streets. And around them, LaTrobe, Batman, Victoria streets, and Hoddle St, that impassable but inevitable north-south sewer on the city’s east, named for surveyor Robert Hoddle, his straight ruler and his neat city grid. Melbourne has two great divides: east and west, and north and south of the river. Hoddle Street is the bridge between the latter.
But the little suburban streets, up in Fitzroy where I live, are a more capitalist affair, often named after the original landowners, sometimes failing to join where holdings met, as each worthy set down his own idea of a good street pattern, regardless of his neighbour.
Even in the 19th century, there were signs of the great Australian literalism that led to the Melbourne cricket ground being called the Melbourne Cricket Ground: in Clifton Hill, find North Terrace to the north of the Darling Gardens, South Terrace to the south.
But in Elwood, leafy and peaceful by the beach, there are the poets’ streets: Ruskin, Mitford, Milton, Browning, Tennyson. I don’t need to look these up to know them.
Near my old place in Glenhuntly (technically one of fifteen or so “old places”), Nirvana Street (Ref: 68 K2) adjoins Karma Avenue, a hymn to suburban paradise. The corner of Edna St and Karma Ave an unlikely place.
In its details, the Melways seems to me to go beyond the call of duty. In Edition 23, Map 248 (a yellow-edged “special purpose map”) not only shows the sculptures on the Arts Centre’s lawns, but names them. A sculpture of a giant ceramic proto-horse that then stood in the National Gallery of Victoria’s moat is given not only a name, but a date and the name of the artist, reflecting that particular work’s popularity with the people of Melbourne
Yet the map also assumes a mantle of impartiality, objective authority. There can be no prevarication in cartography; no acknowledgement of subjectivity, fallibility. (A short introduction notes that “the publishers do not accept responsibility for any errors or omissions”; so if your street has fallen into an informational black hole, it’s your look-out.)
And of course, these days, maps ain’t maps. They are versions of a story, you might say – unless you just want to find a way to avoid the South Eastern at rush hour.
The Melways is one version of Melbourne. Another version can be found online at Google Maps, where basic street maps and jigsaws of aerial and satellite photographs put the viewer in a shaky helicopter over the town. You can see a lot in these pictures. But despite the depth of detail – the colour of a roof, a car parked in a driveway – the basic Google version loses the meta-layer of meaning that the Melways spreads across the city.
There is a Google Maps function that allows users to create maps to which notes can be added, usually in a kind of cartoon speech bubble-cum-map pin. This function allows people to annotate the Earth according to Google; to footnote the map and to share information. After Hurricane Katrina, clusters of cartoon bubbles spread over a map of New Orleans, announcing safe roads, resource centres, places where people needed help.
I like this kind of shared storytelling, the construction of a map of what is really there, as opposed to what a camera or a surveyor sees. The physical object, the place, has no meaning in and of itself and the cartographer’s representation applies a very narrow filter, saying that what matters is scale, orientation, elevation, location: all the things that can be measured. But these are not the things that are there.
Example: the path I walk and ride most often is a deliberately curved strip of bitumen laid through a long, skinny park where the old railway line used to run through my suburb. I think of it as a roll of green carpet, scattered with oversized children’s toys – trees, park benches, big old logs that my son loves to walk along, holding my hand for balance.
Almost every day I walk east along the park and then down a pretty side street to the local shops, or ride west until I’m directly north of Melbourne University and can turn south alongside another park; or I follow the old railway line as it runs north from the Fitzroy Pool in a passenger-harvesting arc through North Fitzroy until I reach my “stop”, Rae St, and have to complete the last few hundred metres of my journey on the dangerous, crazy-car road.
I’m one of hundreds who use the park to get where they’re going. Would many – any - of them know the exact length in metres of their daily journey on the grey bitumen strip? No. They measure it in a sense of motion and time; a number of curves taken at a lean on the bike; a proportion of a longer journey, different for each traveller; a movement towards or away from the screech of trams and heavy wheeling of trains. They see different landmarks and signposts – the gardener might note the first flowering bulbs pushing up into spring, the student might watch the progress of the murals on the wall of the graffiti house across the road from the park.
Where my daily walk turns off to the “village” of North Fitzroy, there is a patch of artificial bushland, cleverly mounded and heaped so as not to appear too new. Because I once wrote for the local newspaper, I happen to know that the particularly generous arc of the gravel paths set around the circular beds is a trace of the grain silos that stood here last century, first serving the trains, then sitting empty for years. None of my friends, women who also walk this path with prams and toddlers on bikes, know this.
Even the Melways lacks the scale to find room for this tiny detail of place. Does it matter? It’s an arcane piece of local knowledge, satisfying only to me and to the landscape architects who dreamed it up. Fifteen years later, it’s just a path and some trees.
But Melbourne has such places everywhere; places of unnoticed significance; places that mean something if you only know the code.
There are crosses tied to trees, to power poles where someone has died. There are pure-looking stretches of grass, seemingly unmarked and empty of meaning, where, once, someone fought his first fight or lovers lay on the grass and counted stars on a warm summer night. There are places for gathering; for dog owners these are particular pieces of parkland, sometimes council-sanctioned, sometimes spontaneous. Just north of my home, in the Merri Park (Ref: 30 C9) is Fluffy Little White Dog Land, where a majority, often all, of the pooches are little, fluffy and white. This is of course not marked on the map.
The graffiti artists know that the bike path underpass at Royal Parade (Ref: 29 G10) – an old railway tunnel – is their place. They have divided the walls between them and done their best, a gallery of sneering faces, science-fiction effects and trompe-l’oeil crazy cities.
As I get older, I catch myself using that oldster’s opaque navigational aid – where things used to be. Not just big things, like the grain silos, but shops and even houses. There is a bar in a big, triangular Victorian building in the North Fitzroy village that I still think of as “where the post office used to be”. That was fifteen years ago. And down in Scotchmer Street (Ref: 30 B12) is a mid-grey building whose dull colour reminds me of the graffiti that was painted on it (and swiftly painted over) a couple of years ago. “Bring back the red, you boring cunts,” it read. But they never did, and the post-office-van red the building used to be exists now only in my memory, the graffitist’s and, of course, that of the boring cunts who painted it over.
Even the carefully measured-out roads and rail lines would become dumb physical objects if we all disappeared tomorrow, taking our car keys with us.
To map my life in Melbourne, or that of any other single resident, onto these pages would be impossible. To include everyone’s lives and experiences would be beyond impossible. It would take magic.
Any technophile will know this quote: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” (Arthur C. Clarke, in 1961.)
Over the past hundred years, that magic has been the telephone, mechanical flight, then television, space travel. We knew it wasn’t magic, but responded to the technology as if it were. When I check out the GPS devices in my local electronics store, I can see that a quasi-magical merging of map and information isn’t that far away. The high-end models can receive and store information about “points of interest”, favourite routes and locations; some will send a restaurant’s number to your phone, or play your digital music for you. In the headlong merging of communication technologies, it won’t be long before these beeping boxes are Web-connected. And once something’s connected to the Web, it’s as close as you can get to tapping into the mind of the hive.
So, without going too far into the technical details and the geeky world of How, which would bore those people who only care about What, imagine this: you are thinking of moving into a particular street. But you don’t sleep well, and as you walk down the street towards the “open for inspection” sign, you consult your electronic Melways. Stories come up: the hotel on the corner with the 3am licence; the family of hoons, seemingly infinite in number, who use the laneway beside the house as a kind of al fresco repair shop/barbecue area/cricket pitch; the 350 commuters who defy the speed humps and no-right-turn signs every morning in order to shave three minutes off their drive to work by going right past your new house. You keep walking, possibly into the next suburb.
Or you’re cycling towards the city down Canning St, Carlton (Ref: 29 K12) and as you spin past the once-identical, cheek-by-jowl terraces, your earphones whisper the stories to you: this house was built with blood money, a murdering brother’s inheritance; the two genteel English sisters who lived in the terraces named “Irene” and “Elaine” were actually lovers, fooling the neighbours for forty years; that in this darkened house with tattered blinds is an old man who sleeps all day and by night shuffles barefoot from room to room, carrying his ashtray and whisky glass with him.
This Melways, indistinguishable from magic, would allow you to add your stories; to record your feelings of grief when you pass the park where you kissed him goodbye, or the way the violent violet of the flowering jacaranda trees made you feel the Christmas you were 21; to warn others about a loose board in the bridge; to add your little stock of happiness and tears to the pool.
It would itself be infinite.
This could be done the hard way. We could spend hours getting to know each other. We could talk to our neighbours, hold street parties and open houses, knock on the door to see if that old man is all right. We could listen.
And whether or not the technology could handle it, right now no one is going to build this thing, my imaginary universal Melways. Some people revel in their anonymity; for them, that is the city. Some people just wouldn’t want to know.
But I like the idea. Whether or not they all get loaded into an electronic database accessible by hand-held wireless thingummybobs, all those layers of thought, feeling, history and hope are there.
In one 250 by 250 metre grid square of a blue-edged Melways map is enough human experience and history for a lifetime’s or a world’s worth of study and understanding: the trees and bush that once grew from the land, the animals that lived there, the thousands of years of indigenous occupation, whether the place in question was a busy campsite, a rarely visited sacred site or a valuable annual source of some seed that only existed for one week in the season known as early autumn. Add in the years of Melbourne’s expansion, the cutting down of the trees, the paving of the roads and the little lives lived in each house, even for the mere 150 or so years the suburbs have been spreading out; multiply that by the possible ways of looking at those people – anthropological, historical, as ancestors, as artists, as invaders, as victims, as pioneers, as women, as men, as parents, as children, as human units in epidemics, as voters, as economic forces, as tradesmen, as sexual beings fucking and fighting, as worshippers and infidels, spouses, adulterers, buyers and sellers, sensual creatures and cold intellect - there is too much in even that small block of land for any one person to process.
And so we have maps. We write things down, make drawings, representations, in an effort to get a hold on things. I may never see a map of children’s secret places in Melbourne, a map of the great party houses of the late 1980s, a taxi driver’s map of the town, a literal birds-eye view picking out the parks and nesting trees, or a schematic diagram showing the tangled thread of every bike ride I’ve ever taken (I picture it attached firmly to certain places by a bunch of lines, others as single, dreamy wisps of one-off journeys floating in the breeze of time.)
I may never see these maps, but I like to think that they could exist; that there might be some way of not only recording each individual’s experience of Melbourne, but of linking them together, opening them up to each other.
Canning St, Carlton, is supposed to be the busiest on-road bike path in Melbourne. Each bike rolls almost silently, parallel with the straight line of the kerb, tipping directly down into the city towers ahead. Each bike is a small thing. I think of time-lapse photography of city roads at night; where there are a lot of cars, their lights blur together into a single brighter glow. This is how Canning St would look, if every bike’s trajectory was overlaid on all the others; a thickly woven chain of turning wheels and pumping legs. This would be a more accurate picture of how Canning St is over a single day than a photograph taken once at any time of day.
This cumulative truth is what I’m thinking of; that the land stays the same under our feet, but we change, move on, move across it. Perhaps this is why we love the Melways. In all its practical, cartographical inadequacy for our lives, it is at least a start, a base.
It traps between its pages only a Platonic shadow of the real thing, the city which can never be grasped. But at least it is a common version, one thing we agree on.
In the defining irony of city life – that the more we crowd together the less we seem to have true community – the Melways and its ubiquitous map references represent a starting point, a safe ground to return to when our differences look like overwhelming us.
Perhaps the centre cannot hold: but where is the centre of Melbourne?
Flinders St station is at Map 1B N9, and always will be; the steps from the concourse down to the street are specifically labelled on the map – “steps”, with no further explanation; but another of Melbourne’s secret codes, as familiar to six-month-stay international students as to 60-year-old Vietnam veterans, is that this is where we meet, on the steps looking out across the intersection of Swanston and Flinders Streets; up to the postmodern jumble of Federation Square, the severe serenity of St Paul’s Cathedral or the overspill of drinkers outside Young & Jackson’s hotel. Since Federation Square, with its artificial and rocky hill, was built, it too has become a meeting place – perhaps in a few years we will find a name for that place and it will be labelled such in the Melways.
In the centre of the intersection, Map 1B shows a lilac circle, denoting traffic lights. If I mark the centre of that circle with a small black dot of ink, I create a reference point; as if rising up above the city I turn to Map 2F G5 and see the CBD plus the parks and gardens around it, the river, the beginning of the Westgate Freeway, with Flinders and Swanston Streets at grid reference G5. By the time I’ve reached the 1000-metre map grid, the blue pages, the circle, now at Map 43 J9, has shrunk to just one tiny detail in 24 square kilometres of city.
And even though I know that the 70 kilometres of range on the last map I look at, the main key map, is measured from the GPO (no longer, by the way, a post office but an upmarket mall), I like to think that this intersection outside Flinders St Station is the true centre – a place everyone passes through one way or another, an end- and starting- point for the roads and railway lines, and one that probably, in my imaginary map of the city’s experiences, would glow the brightest with memory, contain the greatest hubbub of whispered stories.
6.30 this morning, riding my bike in the pastel dawn past sleeping houses, I thought of the Melways, and of myself as somehow inside it, a flyspeck moving along a brown line on a blue-bordered map. The thought made me queasy and I returned to reality, to the cool flow of air and the rolling transfer of energy from lungs to legs to wheels to road.
I headed east on the bike track, passing between the roaring morning freeway and the backs of red-brick houses, golf courses and the lazy, brown, rain-specked river. In places, the official track has been bypassed; safe curves have been straightened out by fast, straight, muddy trails following the shortest distance between two points. Where the wide bitumen bike track hugs the freeway, protected by a chain link fence, two young men on mountain bikes came tearing along through the bush beside me, moving with dangerous speed for no reason I could see but the joy of it. That track is not on the map either.
I remembered that I live in a city of almost four million people, and that I could never know or understand them all, and that life cannot be written down, a city cannot be pictured, even in the Melways. And instead of queasy, overwhelmed, that made me feel elated.
