A layered landscape
Don’t it always seem to go, muses Tony Milne of Rough Milne Mitchell.
I write this while sitting at the bar of Curly Lewis. A niche craft beer bar overlooking the parade of Bondi. A panoply of the fit, active, sculptured and those wanting to be noticed. The bar staff are mostly Kiwi and Irish, attentive, inquisitive and seemingly interested in what I am doing. Much younger, too.
I thought I’d write about gobi blocks, I say. A small concrete paver that I have adored and courted for years. Libated by a Salty Mermaid Gose, I explain a gobi is a paver with voids, best imagined like an egg carton, that allows the earth beneath to breathe. Voids that can be filled with gravel or soil from which grass or a groundcover can grow.
They are trafficable, but not so good in heels, I’ve been told. Importantly, they provide a permeable surface, allowing rainfall to filtrate. A substitute for concrete and asphalt and, I propose, one option that should be more frequently used for the health of our urban environment. Surprisingly the attention of my audience remains, or at least feigned, so I continue. Albeit somewhat tangentially.
The morning of the beer at Curly’s I had run the coastal walk that connects the necklace of eastern beaches between Bondi and Coogee. A mix of concrete path and cantilevered boardwalk, you navigate around and over mammoth plinths of Hawkesbury sandstone. Stone that was thrust, bent and folded some 300 million years ago and further etched, eroded and sculpted by the relentless rolling of the Tasman Sea. Nooks, crannies and indentations are all places where plants cling in hope. A landform with an impressive biophysical narrative, but also a landscape of many layers, I posture, often hidden though. My audience nods. I continue.
I ruminated as I ran that morning. Reflecting on a presentation titled “Embedding truth-telling in city design” at a recent conference I’d attended. Jason Eades, Director of Aboriginal Melbourne from the City of Melbourne, eloquently and forcefully spoke about the neglect of the First Nations people as Melbourne was built.
He cited an abhorrent example of cultural desecration. A concrete car park at the Victoria markets is the site of an aboriginal cemetery, first ploughed and then paved for the car park. Some 9000 graves
lie below the concrete. A restorative park is planned, and with the removal of the concrete and through genuine collaboration, a cultural layer that should never have been buried will be revealed.
The bar staff listen as I venture that environmental health and culture are inextricably linked. Further, I suggest, Joni Mitchell recognised and sang about this 50 years ago, dismayed upon waking in Hawaii, drawing the curtains and gazing out over a parking lot. Paradise lost. An anthem ahead of its time, or not, the rest of us are only now realising. The bar staff google Joni Mitchell. I should have said The Corrs.
A gobi block is a tiny piece of the puzzle, possibly irrelevant, but nevertheless a conversation starter.
