All Change Here

 

Wala is life, Allara Briggs-Patterson sings into my earphones. The First Peoples of this land, including her Yorta Yorta mob, know all about water and how it shapes all of time and space. In India, our history lessons always begin with the Indus Valley civilisation, whose ingenuity was fuelled by the river system they built cities on. The rivers of the Deccan peninsula sustained kingdoms that endured for centuries before the British came along. 

 

You can’t talk about humanity without talking about water.

 

Cultures all over the world still undertake pilgrimages to significant water bodies. I recall how for winter holidays at my mum’s birthplace of Hyderabad, we would take a long-distance train that was frequented by pilgrims to Sabarimala – a Hindu sacred site on the banks of the Pamba River in Kerala. It’s appropriate then that this particular trek to water begins at Coburg Station.

 

There was once a time that you would make your local church the tallest building in the vicinity, for maximum proximity to God. Now that honour goes to Coburg’s new skyrail station: a sleek modern elevated platform with a hexagonal facade that is partly inspired by Arabic motifs, partly reminiscent of a carrot cake covered in royal icing. And while the Upfield service can be unholy most days, I would say it’s deserving. How the entire line wasn’t scrapped by the Kennett government’s big rail cutdown is nothing short of divine intervention.

 

The little red brick Gothic building next to it, the heritage-preserved old station, would agree with me. It’s put up with so much.

 

Melbourne’s northern suburbs got the real short end of the stick while railway lines were sprouting all over the west and south-east. The Upfield line took root 31 years after the very first train (to Port Melbourne), and even then went only as far as Coburg. There was initially a fledgling plan for a line to transport bluestone quarried by Pentridge prisoners, but nothing came of it. And when Victorian Railways finally relented and gave Coburg a passenger service in 1884, local papers complained about the ‘unlovely and dirty’ older Dogbox carriages they were left with, while the shiny new Tait trains headed off to the southeast.

 

I step off the ageing, rattling Comeng carriage into Southern Cross Station and watch a brand-new High Capacity Metro Train glide towards Pakenham. Some things never change.

 

It turns out V/Line has decided to throw my nostalgic parallels off course by cancelling all trains on the Seymour line, so I begrudgingly head to the coach terminal. I have never been a big fan of lengthy bus journeys, but I committed to this bit and can’t turn around now.

 

“Where you going, love?” the driver asks.

 

“Heathcote Junction.”

 

He raises an amused eyebrow. “That’s very rare, someone getting off at that station. Do you live there?”

 

“Oh, no,” I chuckle nervously. “I’m just going to see someone.”

 

It’s not wrong. Technically, I’m going to meet my first friend in Coburg at her hometown.

 

Heathcote Junction is more collection of farmhouses than country town, with nary a pub nor general store in sight – inconceivable! The settlement sprung around the railway station (hence the name): a junction for a line to Bendigo through Heathcote proper that was demolished in the 50s. 

 

I’m not here to dwell on the town itself, or the mishaps and missed opportunities of Victoria’s railway network. Instead, I trudge up a winding mountain road to a spot labelled on Google Maps as ‘Start of Merri Creek’.

 

The Merri Merri, to use the correct Woi-Wurrung name. She isn’t even the oldest waterway in the Naarm/Melbourne area, with her cousin the Moonee Ponds Creek originating from a lava flow several thousands of years prior. Together they form the natural eastern and western boundaries of Coburg respectively, and they’ve both paid heavy tolls for it. While the Moonee Ponds Creek now has his basalt bed lined with cold concrete after being diverted to make way for the Tullamarine Freeway, the Merri Merri has had her bluestone carved out to build that fortress of human horrors called Pentridge Prison right beside her.

 

And now, in a twist of irony, the place where she bubbles up from the ground is blocked from public access by the barbed-wire fencing of a squatter-style farmhouse.

 

If I crane my neck, I can catch a glimpse of her resting placidly; without the fury she can display on rainy days, though she ought to be furious. As I move closer, a host of Wanderer butterflies rises from the ground, fluttering in orange waves around me. They are migrants to this country just as I am. They were brought here by the creek just as I was.

 

The butterflies have decided I’m not a threat, so I tread lightly out of the wood and back down the road. Thanks to V/Line’s incompetence, I have a whole hour to sit at the station, eat my packed lunch of rice and beans, and contemplate my observations all the way back to Southern Cross.

 

I can’t help wondering if the person who took possession of that plot knows how much significance that little waterhole has to people that someone took the trouble to create a Google landmark for it. Do they know of the generations of corroborees she played warm host to? How they were interrupted by John Batman’s boot, by the ‘treaty’ he proposed to the Wurundjeri at the confluence of the Merri and Yarra, which was then invalidated by the Crown? Do they know of the outrage and tireless efforts from the community to repair crimes committed on her banks, of all degrees ranging from effluent pollution to rape and murder?

 

This is my idealism speaking, of course. In all likelihood they simply looked at a water source and saw a means of profit and ownership. Ownership has been a defining feature of Australia’s colonisation.

 

So I feel humbled then, that my own connection to the Merri Merri is not one money can buy.

 

Back in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I was a struggling student still relatively new to Melbourne and one foot out of my lodgings in Carlton. No one needs reminding of the fickle patterns of the city’s lockdowns, but the moment I saw an opportunity, I decided to join the rest of the cabin-sick for a walk down the Capital City Trail. Somewhere between Fitzroy and Northcote I realised I’d been distracted by the nearby creek and the massive Koonda Lat rail bridge and gone well and truly off the map. 

 

But for some reason I didn’t turn around. I knew as long the creek was here, I’d never actually be lost.

 

I ended up following the Merri Merri for five hours. I only slowed down when I approached the wide bank of what I now know is a murnong harvest; the very rocky banks near De Chene Oval that give her the name; the bluestone bridges built on the backs of convicts; and finally, the weir that is now home to the entire bin chicken population of the inner north. With the sun setting, I legged it to the nearest tram stop.

 

It was a good break out of lockdown, but I thought nothing more of it. Then five months later through a last-minute share-housing request, I would end up living a stone’s throw away from Coburg Lake Reserve.

 

It’s been a few years since that walk and I still wonder if it was a wild coincidence. But what I have no doubt about now is where I feel the most at home.

 

Coburg is a funny sort of place. It’s still trying to shake off a prison’s hellish reputation, but what’s in place of it raises more questions than answers. It is both a haven for marginalised communities, and a bypass for freewheeling souls on bikes. It is simultaneously old and new; creating not quite postcode envy, but postcode defensiveness; the kind where you rag on your neighbourhood all the time but can’t think of living anywhere else. And I understand why.

 

So once I’m off the wheezing old Comeng train and back on home ground, I keep walking. Through the twin railway stations and down Sydney Road, past the library where I say hello to the usual stragglers, in and out of my usual falafel shop. Down Gaffney Street, past the faded-paint sign for an Italian video library, through mills that haven’t been mills in decades. Up across the lake, past the bin chickens, and along the Merri Merri. 

 

She did this on purpose. She took my feet and put me exactly where I needed to be.