My Year with Bluestone: Water Levels

It's becoming a familiar feature of this project that I'm now seeing familiar things differently: like observing the way bluestones are laid in streets and buildings. Today's post is about my beloved Merri Creek, the tributary of the Yarra River that practically runs past my front door. There are a number of bluestone features along this Creek, and in the first days of this blog in January, I wrote about the river downstream from my house.

Today we're going upstream, towards another bluestone quarry. Along the way there's a dear little arched bridge that crosses the creek and takes you into a rather liminal zone. You're not really very far from houses, a playground, a high school, and yet there is a little wetlands reserve where you can go and hear frogs. You can walk along an unpaved track that is muddy in winter and baked hard in summer. There are little hidden tracks between the creek and the paths. So, frankly, you can hide there. A wonderful and small suburban secret.

But to the bridge. It's slippery when wet so wire has been nailed across it... The water levels in the Creek rise and fall a lot, because the storm water from the streets runs directly into the stream.

Some days the water level is very high, and the creek floods and becomes impassable at certain points. Other days the water levels are low and you can see these courses of bluestones running along at various points -- presumably these were made when the creek was being used as a bluestone quarry.

So these are secret bluestones, I think: observable only when the water is low, and when you are thinking about bluestone and seeing it everywhere.

My Year with Bluestone: Au Natural

Today we move away from the examples of built and re-built bluestone to focus back on the arrival of bluestone in Melbourne, along volcanic basalt flows, past my house, along the Merri Creek, down towards the junction with the Yarra river.

This is the more geological aspect of my project where I am most outside my comfort zone, and where it is convenient to remind myself that this blog is a place-holder for some more sustained research in second semester.

Some of the geological sites and books I have started to look at were very difficult to understand, so I am delighted to discover the website of the Merri Creek Management Committee, a body formed in 1989 to protect and manage this vulnerable waterway (lined with industrial sites and subject to heavy erosion by the planting of European trees: truly, I wept when the willow trees were removed, but I'm over that now and glad to see more and more birdlife coming back to the creek).

I was going to post just my two pictures of basalt piles along the Creek in Clifton Hill,

but then found this site with its own pictures and analysis of what we are seeing here, though I confess I can't quite match up my images with theirs of Sites No. 3 and No. 6 (there are at least 45 listed on their website). Here's a paragraph of geological description: I need to find out more about "vescicles" and also need to go back and find ... the Cave!!

The principal feature is a very clear exposure of at least two lava flows or flow units that form a vertical cliff face adjacent to the low level crossing of the Merri Creek by the Merri Path at the west of Creek Parade, The lowermost sections of the flows exposed are at creek level 30 metres east of the low bridge on the Merri Path. This flow is ropy with many large aligned vesicles and probably represents a thin cooling flow unit (or several units) with rapid gas escape forming aligned and elongated gas bubble holes. The flow is well exposed as it is frequently washed clean of weathered debris by floods in the Merri Creek. Overlying this and well exposed adjacent to the bridge is a massive non-ropy lava flow with complex jointing and weathering features. The lower 3 metres of the flow has persistent vertical joints with a spacing of 40 cm to 50 cm giving a distinct columnar form. Closely spaced but irregular horizontal joints divide the columns into angular sub-blocks. Overlying the columnar section with a disjunct boundary, the upper part of the flow has disorganised jointing giving an irregular fractured surface

The websites also register concern about graffiti and souveniring from the sites: people do seem to want their own little bit of bluestone, even if it means putting the natural site at risk.

My Year with Bluestone: Water and Gabions

No, I didn't know what a "gabion" was either, but I took these photos along the Merri Creek, and then needed to know what I was dealing with.

A gabion (Italian for cage) is filled with rocks or other substance, used as a retaining wall, often allowing water to flow through, and designed to be flexible as the land may move. This informative Landscaping Network site says the method is both very ancient (originally made from woven willow wattle, like a giant basket) and ecologically desirable as they can use recycled concrete or other material, like this jumble of mostly bluestone. Here are some lovely ones made with glass.

The website also stressed they don't need skilled labour, unlike dry stone walls or the more precisely constructed bluestone walls used in building. I need to go back to the Creek when it is raining to see water flowing through these gabions, but the same day I took these photos, there was just water flowing down this much more formal bluestone wall. You can hear the roar of traffic on Heidelberg Rd overhead but also the sweet sounds of birds singing after rain: my emotional history will try and capture the atmospherics of bluestone. In this case, it's the rattle of storm water and the delicate glint of water against the dark stone:

http://www.landscapingnetwork.com/walls/retaining-gabion.html

My Year with Bluestone: Stairs to Nowhere

Along the Merri Creek just a little upstream from the Heidelberg Rd bridge, the concrete bike path diverges into a little set of stairs. A bluestone retaining wall frames the embankment on one side, and longer stones frame the stairs on the right. The staircase seems to lead to a path along the river but it didn't look very inviting. Perhaps I'll explore when it is no longer the height of snake season.

Long couch grass is growing between some of the stones. That's pretty unusual, as bluestone walls usually fit pretty tightly. (I can foresee a time when I might be able to make judgements about the quality and even the date of bluestone walls from their mortar: there seem to be quite thick layers here.) The pole on a slant bears, if I remember correctly, a warning about flood levels. Just to the right of these steps is a low timber crossing, which is regularly flooded after heavy rains, as the Creek fills up. 

To me, it's hard not to see something a bit whimsical here. The stairs certainly help shape the embankment as the path twists and curves to the right, yet they also lead the eye and the step upward, away from the determined running, walking and cycling that goes on daily here. The steps seem to offer your own secret little space of wilderness, in dramatic juxtaposition to the civic geometry that invites you there. 

Cockatoos, creek, work

What with going to the gym these days, and gadding about in Europe, and then being sick, and finishing up a big semester, I've not spent much time along the Merri Creek the last few months. So for how long have there been black cockatoos there? I went for a walk on Friday afternoon, and at first thought there was a murder of crows in the tree on the opposite bank, but then I saw a flash of yellow. (And as I realise, the Australian ravens tend to go about in pairs, as I know from seeing them perching on the top of the huge Norfolk pine two houses down.)  Anyway, I think they were yellow-tailed black cockatoos. There were about a dozen of them, moving from tree to tree, hanging upside down and generally ... creating (scroll down this page and click to hear their call). And I've just seen a few more this morning when I rode up to let the chickens out at Ceres.

This creek is full of surprises. I've been living on its banks for sixteen years, as its vegetation has been improved and refined, and de-Europeanised. I hated it when they cut down the willow trees (J used to sing at them in his pram when we would walk along), but since then I've probably seen more birds; and apparently the willows were dreadful for erosion of the banks.

Normally P does the fortnightly morning run to Ceres, but once I'd got out of bed it was pleasant enough riding along the creek. And now I'm back at my desk, it's good to think of those cockatoos busily working their way through the trees along the water.

Now that teaching is over, and now that I have the all-clear from my editor to do the final revisions of my book (and write the last chapter) more or less as I see fit, I'm preparing to fire up the cylinders for a final onslaught. I have to hold all the ideas in my head at the same time, to ensure the balance and sequencing of the argument is right. I had a quick read through the other day. Having a few months' break from it was good (try telling that to the ARC!), and overall it's not looking too bad. Let's see how much I can get done before I leave for Siena in July.

Today will be a pleasant clean-up day: washing, ironing, running Joel to band rehearsal, sweeping up piles of bright yellow leaves from the garden, catching up on email, then the afternoon at a friend's retrospective art exhibition where J, the drummer (the artist's son) and the bassist will play, then a dusk trip up to Ceres to put the chickens away. Then tomorrow? Chapter Seven:

Bells: Strike Three!

I'm at home marking honours essays and theses this morning, but can hear, as I heard last night, the very distinctive sound of a bellbird. There is a little community of them at a certain turn of the Merri, where I walk most mornings, and in summer you can see their mossy green bodies at eye level as they hang upside down feeding in the trees alongside the path. I've not heard one in our garden before, but it is a wonderful piercing and distinctive sound. If you follow the link above, you can hear exactly what I'm hearing.

On my desk at work is a beautiful tower (ok, vase full) of pink Canterbury Bells, given me by a student, in commemoration of Chaucer, and even more specifically, of Criseyde, whose name and reputation will be rung like a bell down the centuries.

And on my bedside table, the novel I was reading on the plane home, recommended by the same student for the purpose, Dorothy Sayers' Nine Tailors, which is structured by bell-ringing in a little East Anglian church. I'm not a huge reader of detective fiction, but I had read this before (and completely forgotten the plot). It was nice to buy it in a bookshop on Venice beach, though!

Ringing the bells for serendipity this morning.

OK, now back to the marking.

Mind, Matter, Nature: Paper, Scissors, Rock

On my walk this morning, I came to the spot where I regularly pause, and make a modest obeisance to the goddess, and breathe deeply and in the morning sun visualise any cancer cells being rinsed from my body and passing down the creek. As I approached the spot, I saw there was a little clump of brown mushrooms glistening in the sun.

Oh good! I first thought. Here's a sign that something is working: a kind of energy field I have tapped into, or produced (honestly, I'm not normally one who goes in for this kind of thing, but the radio was full of Jane McGrath and breast cancer and death, so I reckon I'm excused).

But then I thought. Oh no! This clump of mushrooms is almost exactly the same shape as the image of breast cancer cells I had also posted about. Was this an omen of a less positive kind?

But then I thought. Oh good! This means my meditations are working; as the cells have been expelled from my body.

What an elaborate mental game of paper, scissors, rock to play with oneself, reading and re-reading signs from nature in this way.

I also had a dream about Glenn McGrath last night: we were saving some dolphins, or discovering some new ones after another had died. Vague, shifting memory I can't fully recall now. Perhaps also coloured by anxiety about my child, now heading in to the ninth day of a horrible flu.

There's obviously something here about the power of celebrity death to cathect emotion. But I don't have time to process it further: just entering the chaos of the last week before going to England for three and a half weeks.

Wildlife update

OK, so my last entry had a link to a photo of a flying fox skimming the Yarra river. No photos this time, but some real wild-life sightings to report, from four separate walks along the Merri Creek. First, a long-necked tortoise, dark green and mossy-looking from being underwater, sitting on a rock in the middle of the Creek, demonstrating exactly why it's called what it is. Next, a blue-tongued lizard, though he's an accustomed sighting. He lives under the concrete path and just extends his head, or the curve of his body, to pick up the morning sun. Third, eight wee ducklings exploring the weeds with their mother, yesterday. And just now, what I'm pretty sure was a tiger snake, sprawled across the path. I was walking along casually thinking that piece of bark dropped in the heavy winds today looked like a snake when I realised what it was. It slithered through the grass down towards the water, and I pointed it out to two women passing by. One of them, Amelia (we had introduced ourselves years ago when I used to push Joel in his pram along the creek), went poking towards it with her stick. "Come out," she said, "we're friendly!" The other woman and I exchanged glances and decided to head our separate ways...