nostalgia

There was an article in the local press about Paul Keating's vision of the huge Barangaroo waterfront development that is to take place in Sydney. It foccused on his desire to get rid of some industrial heritage in an attempt to put the foreshore back to something like the shape it was before European settlement. Well, I assume they mean European settlement, the article says

In a stinging letter to the Department of Planning, the architects Philip Thalis, Paul Berkemeier and Jane Irwin accuse planners of cutting 1.7 hectares of public land from their vision, in a misguided attempt to recreate the pre-settlement coastline.

Maybe they are talking about proper pre-settlement, in which case they mean returning the foreshore to the river valley it was before the last ice age; that'll see my taxes go up. The Guringai people had lived in what is now Sydney for a while before the Europeans arrived. The clever money says they were probably here before the last ice age, a mere 6500 years ago. I digress; we all know Australia didn't exist until 1770 and 1606 if you're Dutch. Ahem.

Anyway, I can see and understand Keating's vision, but don't share it. The shore is what it is and you cannot go back. Make the area as pleasant as possible, but don't harken back to a past none of us actually know.

OPEN space will be stripped from Sydney's biggest urban renewal project at East Darling Harbour for the sake of a ''Disneyland view of history'', say the architects who won the design competition for the site.

They go on to say it is a Mickey Mouse view of history. Ouch.

I had my own moment of nostalgia this morning. I looked at a google maps picture of a lake where, as a boy, I spent hours fishing. I wondered what it looked like today. I had a moment of sadness when I saw the dirt road around the lakes shore. There used to be only overgrown muddy paths. The scrubbland that had surrounded the site had been cleared and looked like bare earth. Where a small car park had been was a roof suggestive of club house. The picture made the area look as if it were being turned into a golf course. If the last owner of the land I knew was the owner when the pic was taken I would wager that is exactly what is happening. The lake has avtually been aplit in two with what looks like a dirt road cutting it in half. I suspect half of it will be filled.

So to the nostalgia. I would spend hours fishing that lake, some times days on end. When the fishing season was closed I would prepare areas to fish, flattening land for my chair, pruning trees, making gaps in reeds. When I was not doing that I would walk around the lake's edge, looking for fish, observing their behaviour. I have one of my very few - possibly my only - physical memory from a time at the lake. Whenever I walk into a "puddle" of cooler air it reminds me of taking the short cut from the car park to the bay with the small island and the stream that flowed from the lake. I remember a night of fishing when mum and dad were out with me; I fell asleep on a sun lounger and they stayed awake, huddled under an umbrella in the rain. I stocked some of the first carp into that lake, lifting them form the plastic bins they arrived in. I later caught one of them, far larger but definitely the same fish, easily indetifiable by its distinctive scale pattern. Some years, in the off-season, travellers would rest up in the car park. One year a guy's dog had a litter and as I chatted with him his alsatian puppies literally covered my feet and damn near chewed through the laces of my (gandad's old) walking boots. I remember waking one morning in "swim 1" and seeing the rising sun shining through lifting mists that swirled over a still lake surface. One night, while fishing for carp I caught an eel that managed to piss me off to the extent that I packed up and went home in a huff. It was a very special place. And it is sad to see its destruction.

But hold on a moment.

The lake is not a real lake. It is a gravel pit. It was dug a little more than 40 years ago. I know that because my folks had me in a pram on one of the mounds of gravel when Concord made an early fly-over. The land had previously been owned by family on my mother's side. An ancestral genius - my great grandfather I think, maybe my grandfather - had been approached by the company wanting the gravel. Instead of selling just the gravel he sold the whole 25acre site to them. The land had been rough scrubby bushland, farmland but not good farmland. Unused, apart from a few cows, only two of which I met. It was owned by someone with no vision for it, so why not offload it and take the cash? Seems fair enough.

The town, Mytchett, is not a throbbing metropolis but is a built up area. Twenty five acres of scrubbland with a 12acre water filled hole in the middle is not a great use of that space, no matter how much it meant to me. For every tree-hugger there will be a hundred golfers and a hundred families that will go to the bistro in the club house and look out over the prettied up lanscape that I had enjoyed watching get overgrown. C'est la vie. I live thousands of miles away and I have found other special places. I, for instance, like the old wharfs and the rough stone walls of Sydney's early industrial years. OK, maybe they should be tidied up so more people will enjoy them, and yes, that will spoil them a little for me. But I still prefer that to pretending it never existed.

If ever more of us want to live on this rock then ever more of it will change. Just deal with it dude. Change for the future, not for the past.

Right, gotta run, so no more of this at the moment.