Billabongs of the Yarra: spaces of difference in Melbourne

Christian Clark

Introduction

A tension exists between space as grounded and space as flowing.  Within each of these framings, spaces facilitate both hegemonic and participatory forms of engagement amongst those who dwell within them.  Drawing on the material and imagined spaces of billabongs, I want to restring this tension, taking advantage of its potential to provoke new ways approaching and living with difference.  Not only is the billabong a uniquely Australian image, it is also a place where there are no fixed boundaries between the fluid and the grounded.  It also offers a space to rest, to consider and create for ourselves honest accounts of the spaces we inhabit and produce.  Following many thinkers and authors of space and flows, I have tied myself to a river: the Yarra.  Using the Yarra as a narrative thread, I want to explore the flows of power and desire and the intimate practices of everyday life in the production of spaces in the city of Melbourne.  Drawing on experiences of cycling along the river and resting at various sites, this paper is also immersed in the Yarra’s material flow.

I begin with the controversy of the proposed dredging of the Yarra in 2005, using this event to open up a spatial history of Richmond: to enable a discussion of space as the emergent outcome of the social, material and discursive flows of everyday practices.  This framework is then extended to incorporate an exploration of the politics of desire that generate these flows, investigating in particular the impact of British occupation on Australian people and places.  At this point I introduce the figure of the billabong to provide a way of thinking about the production of space (including that opened by research) in a way that acknowledges partiality and multiplicity and invites honesty and responsibility.  I conclude by connecting these ideas with visits to three billabongs, which provide spaces in which to consider three key issues encountered during my research: environmentalism, multiculturalism, and class relations.  This in turn invites a final reflection on the Indigenous habitation of these sites and of Australia now generally.  Although not initially a direct intention of this project, this paper has continually been unsettled by such issues; much of the commentary, therefore, has been drawn to consider this.

Flows and factories

‘As clear as mud’ (Coster 2005, p. 8) read the by-line of an article describing the controversial plan to dredge the Yarra River mouth and Port Phillip Bay.  The plan, announced in March 2005, poured the Yarra River into headlines, citing fears of a ‘public health risk’ and ‘threat to the environment’ (Fyfe 2005, p. 11) created by the allegedly toxic sediments that the dredging would stir up.  It was claimed that the extreme turbidity generated by the dredging could lead to incurable damage (Milner 2005, p. 5) and could suspend toxins in the river indefinitely, creating a danger that ‘might never settle’ (Coster 2005).  The production of ‘dangerous sediments’ emerged throughout these debates as uneasy episodes in Melbourne’s history, episodes that it was assumed we had left behind as we moved into an ecologically-aware twenty-first century.  But these sediments, although settled, were never fully behind us and surpassed.  They were waiting to return, and to force us to revisit the noxious industries and neighbourhood of early Richmond.

The emergence of Richmond as a poor industrial suburb in the nineteenth century was influenced by its topology, which had been worked and reworked by lava flows and river flows over thousands of years (Lacey 2004).  In contemporary terms, the flood prone river flats of the North bank were well suited for poor working-class habitation.  Towering over them was the ‘commanding’ Richmond Hill on which the factory owners resided (McCalman 1984, pp. 8-16); while directly to the South was the Yarra River – Melbourne’s ‘No. 1 Drain’ for industries such as abattoirs, slaughterhouses, tanneries, wool scourers, bone mills and factories producing candles, soap, tallow and glue (Otto 2005).  The streets were unmade, and open gutters provided the only conduits for the putrid flows of human waste, blood, gelatine, arsenic, mercury and occasional carcasses – all of which entered the river (Otto 2005).

According to Melbourne historian Janet McCalman (1984, p. 23), the population of Richmond was ‘entirely unsettled’ due to the high irregularity of work, and the highest death and suicide rate among settler Australians.  Also unsettled in the flows of bourgeoning city industry by 1901 – a mere sixty years after the British invasion and less since the last recorded camps of Woiworung and Bunurong people in the area (Presland 1985) – were the Aboriginal people of the area.  By the turn of the century, as McCalman notes (McCalman 1984, p. 14), not one of Richmond’s 37,824 inhabitants were Indigenous.

Movement, however, was not unrestricted.  Richmond’s Bridge Road crossing (Melbourne’s second bridge) was tolled, with exemptions for men of cloth, politicians, soldiers, police, church goers, funeral goers and men carting manure (Otto 2005).  Indeed, tolls on most bridges and punts limited movement across the Yarra from Melbourne’s establishment in the 1840s to the 1870s when the Government began to remove tolls from their own bridges and later those privately operated.  The division between the North and South side of the Yarra that began with the industrial development of the North bank, and was reinforced by tolls, continues to be a significant spatial feature of Melbourne. 

As more bridges were built, larger trading and cargo vessels were prevented from going further up river (Newnham 1956).  Above Princes Bridge, passenger ferries became the most common vessels on the Yarra (Jones 1981).  Between 1853 and 1863, the ferries were used by those with ‘money to burn’ (Otto 2005, p. 142) on their way upstream to Cremorne Gardens, and were used later to take similar patrons to the Botanic Gardens, Hawthorn Tea Gardens (now Leonda) and Studley Park.  According to Otto (2005, p. 144), these destinations were ‘the bustling outdoor cafes of their day, the equivalent of late twentieth-century Melbourne latte society, except that one would arrive and depart by ferry’.  It was not until the 1950s that cars became the dominant form of transport for Melbourne’s gentry. [1]

Men and women ferrying up the river were often greeted by boys from Richmond and Collingwood swimming at ‘The Sunday’ (also ‘The Sandy’), a sandy spot on the bend near Twickenham Crescent in Burnley.  Hamish Roberts recalls,

We used to swim there and none of us had togs on.  It would usually be on a Sunday and as soon as we saw a boat coming up from Princes Bridge with all the respectable people going to Hawthorne Tea Gardens, we used to get into the water and swim around the boat (in McCalman 1984, pp. 65-6).

Another Richmondite recalls playing down by the Yarra.  On finding deserted hire boats, Ted Venn yelled ‘Hoo hoo hoo-ee’.  If no one responded he would return the boat, occasionally receiving a reward (Loh 1979, pp. 14-15).  Swimming was very much a boys’ past-time and various groups controlled certain swimming locations.  ‘Swimming’, as opposed to the ‘elegant, proper, English’ practice of bathing, was ‘rough, energetic, Australian’ and illegal in the Yarra (Otto 2005, p. 150).  It continued nonetheless.  The river was also a place to confront or experience the vulnerability of life on the Yarra’s banks, either by watching furniture and others goods sweeping past during a flood, or by taking human life itself.  On a Tuesday in December 1902, George Montgomery threw himself off Anderson Bridge into the Yarra, his suicide note reading: ‘I cannot … [sic] this life any longer and go to seek the unknown.  This is the result of trying unsuccessfully to live and keep honest and upright’ (in McCalman 1984, pp. 28-9).

In 1840 Robert Hoddle, Melbourne’s surveyor, commented,

Melbourne, on the river side … is surrounded with a marshy plain, which is frequently inundated; the miasma arising is injurious to the health (in Otto 2005, p. 68).

Forty years later during Melbourne’s boom, the Picturesque Atlas of Australia informs us still:

Nothing can be more … repulsive than the approach to Melbourne by the Yarra … polluted by the drainage and sewage of the city and of half a dozen suburbs, [it] is as offensive to the eye as to the sense of smell; while the malodorousness of the atmosphere is aggravated by the fumes from various noxious industries that have been established on its banks’ (in Otto 2005, p. 68).

And today, over a century later, the noxious industries and their associated miasma are again causing an up welling of concern and anxiety.  The dangers of poor, polluted Richmond are returning, stirred up by the desire for a deeper, more productive, and more internationally competitive port.  What might it mean to have these contaminates return?  I suggest it provokes an interest in the processes through which such sediments are produced and the lives of those who lived with them.  It also suggests that spaces produce difference.  What was a place for the affirmation of life for some was for others a space of destruction.  The production of both sediments and difference in the Yarra allows and sometimes encourages us to make a return to yet other spaces.

Power and production

Doreen Massey (1994, p. 2) argues that place and space are constituted through social practice and social relations: ‘The spatial is social relations “stretched out”’.  This understanding can directly inform the discussion above.  The spatial character of Richmond as low, damp and polluted made it ‘natural’ and ‘inevitable’ that the area become a place for the underprivileged and underemployed.  The dynamic production of space and place that Massey details is extended by Kim Dovey in Fluid City (2005) and Hugh Raffles in In Amazonia (2002).  For both Dovey and Raffles, the dynamic nature of space and place is not limited to social or human relations, but also to non-human configurations animated by an ‘active and irreducible materiality and by a similarly irreducible discursivity’ (Raffles 2002, p. 8).  For Dovey (2005, p. 3), space, ‘while it is reified as a stable ground in everyday life, … is also formed from a confluence of flows - of water, geology, histories, events, memories, colonies, industries and designs’.  Stories of Richmond already noted here provide an illustration of this.  The toxins that threaten to contaminate the Yarra in 2005 are products of particular social relations, material configurations and discursive compositions that, over the last 150 years (and in some cases even longer), have contributed to the very spaces we know as the Yarra in Melbourne.

Thinking space in terms of flows brings attention to the work I am doing here.  I am crafting histories, objects, people, and stories – sediments of space – into ‘my/our space’ (Raffles 2002, p. 7).  In this sense, the work of researching is a process akin to that of dredging itself.  This metaphor presents two important associations.  First, dredging draws up objects - people, things, and stories - which are never complete but slightly decomposed, rhizome-like and inevitably elusive.  Second, it draws attention to the researcher as they become responsible for what they stir up and within which flows they stir.  Researching as dredging recognises any moulding or structuring of objects (those sediments layered through prior work) as the work of the researcher. which ultimately leaves their account unfinished and thus produces space for interpretation and addition (Sinclair 2001).

In this unstable ‘terra anfibia’ (Raffles 2002, p. 42) of porous and temporary boundaries, politics and power are also constituted and in movement and action.  Using Deleuze and Guattari, Dovey and Wood (2005, pp. 212-14) argue that power is less ‘disciplinary’ (ordering and regulating through the fixity of institutions) but more ‘controlling’ (producing and creating futures in an environment of flexibility and mobility).  Desires agitate and streamline such flows of power and potential.  For Dovey and Wood, these desires are the dynamic of late capitalism.  For Raffles (2002, p. 7), on the other hand, the surfacing of the ‘affect-saturated affinities, unreliable and wary intimacies’ of everyday life is common to any world in turbulent change.  In both cases desire and affect generate and stain the flows that produce spaces.

Spaces of desire

The hill and adjacent billabongs now called King’s Domain were a common site for corroboree, inter-clan meetings and camping for the local Woiworung clans and their neighbours.  This site became a mission for Woiworung people under George Langhorne in 1837.  During this period contact between new arrivals and local people became increasingly violent.  Indigenous people were not recognised as defendants or victims by the insensitive and inattentive Colonial judicial system, and settlers openly recorded their attacks and murders of local people in reports, letters and diaries.   By 1839 the mission was displaced by the newly established Aboriginal Protectorate, and was closed in 1849 after it failed to ‘civilise’ the local population (Presland 1985, pp. 64-70).  In 1846 the Royal Botanic Gardens were established on the site and within thirty years the higher terrain was chosen as the site for Government House.  While the initial preference of planners was to build Government House on the river flats opposite Kew, with no view of the city, the building was constructed finally in a dominating position overseeing the city and lower reachers of the River (Otto 2005).  In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, Melbourne became the most powerful seat of government in the country, with the newly-formed Commonwealth Government of Australia also based in the city and immediately passing an Immigration Restriction Act: what became known as the ‘White Australia Policy’ (Jupp 2002).

This desire for a white nation, however, remains unsatisfied.  In 1988, on the Yarra’s southern rise – a prominent meeting site for both immigrants (Government House) and Woiworung (corroboree site) – the skeletal remains of 38 Indigenous people were repatriated after being held at the State Museum.  The remains are buried beneath a large granite rock painted with the Aboriginal flag.  This site is now part of a series of sites recognising Indigenous habitation of the Melbourne area recorded in ‘Another View’ Walking Trail: Pathway of the Rainbow Serpent (Thomas & Evans 1995).  The ability of Indigenous habitation to unsettle colonial occupation on the very basis that the issue of land remains unsettled has been argued in the context of Australia as a nation (Gelder & Jacobs 1998).  In city spaces, in which attempts are made to exclude Indigenous people through representations of Indigeneity as ‘uncivilised’ nomadic and desert dwelling, Indigenous occupation sustains an unsettling power and potential (cf. Jacobs 1996).

The colonisation of Australia and its resistance has not been the only contest over the spaces of the Yarra.  Water has often inundated the banks of the Yarra.  A riverside sign in the wealthy City of Stonnington states: ‘Floods have always presented a threat to property development along the lower reaches of the Yarra River’ (Stonnington City Council 2005).  During the 1880s, a period of economic boom often referred to as ‘Marvellous Melbourne’, the Board of Works Administrator Carlo Catani stated that Batman Avenue and Alexandra Avenue were to become ‘ornamental drives where people go to see and be seen’.  His vision encompassed:

besides the principle of reducing flood-level, the other equally important one of improving and straightening the bed of the river for navigation and recreation purposes, and also that very important factor of forming a beautiful promenade, worthy of Melbourne, on the bank of the river, where all classes could meet (in Otto 2005, pp. 85-6).

The 1890s depression restricted Catani’s budget, however, and it took four decades before his plans were implemented and the Yarra was finally ‘conquered’ (City of Richmond 1988): deepened, widened, paved with bluestone from Richmond Quarry, and then straightened by diverting the waters through the quarry creating Herring Island (Otto 2005).  In 1931, during another period of economic depression, ‘Prahran’s stunning riverside boulevard, Alexander Avenue’ was extended past Chapel Street by the labour of otherwise unemployed men accepting ‘sustenance’ relief from the Government (Stonnington City Council 2005).

 
The major attraction in this beautified and safe place on the River was the Henley Regatta.  Imported in 1904 from the River Thames in London, the Henley Regatta was a key annual event for the Melbourne establishment.  In 1925, 300,000 people attended the carnival.  Corporate viewing boxes and house boats most with their own orchestra covered the river and its banks (Newnham 1956).  While the ‘upper crust of the national capital’(Jones 1981, p. 44) celebrated on the South bank, which was reserved for those who could afford to pay for entry, those who could not participated from the North bank.  Rowing and rowing meets are still prominent on the Yarra, and remain dominated by private schools and clubs.  The major event during the modern day Henley Regatta is the Corporate Cup for ‘team building and corporate entertainment’ (Australian Henley 2005).

Figure 2: Henley Regatta with Government House on centre skyline

Figure 3: Alexander Avenue today

Nevertheless, the desired beautiful Yarra has not been achieved and is beginning to change.  First, all the work in the early 1900s did not prevent flooding, Melbourne’s most extreme flood occurring in 1934.  Second, environmental concerns are now valuing a more ‘natural’ river with snags, twists and vegetation (see for example Lacey 2004).  In Yarra: A Diverting History of Melbourne's Murky River, Otto mourns the loss of billabongs as the consequence of attempts to beautify and control the Yarra.  For Otto (2005, p. 196), billabongs are both a feature of a natural and indigenous river: ‘The original Yarra billabongs formed a constellation of Wurundjeri riverside sites as basic as the stars of the Southern Cross: the defining element of Melbourne or Kulin Woiwurung land’.  Otto (p. 93) demands, ‘Bring back the billabongs.  Give us back our real river’.

Billabong spaces

If only a single ‘us’ and a single ‘real’ were so easily fixed.  In the flows of soil and water, of memories and desires, of invasions and resistance, of compositions and decompositions though which the Yarra itself flows, we must be wiser than to fall for such calls of ‘land ahoy!’ that promise false stability.  Nevertheless, billabongs, literally and metaphorically, appear quite attractive.  Otto (2005, p. 93) writes:

In a high flow the river can break through a different route, perhaps weakened by erosion, bypassing a loop of curve.  Eventually, after repeated floods and erosion, the river may keep going on its newly formed course, bypassing up the old silted-up bend altogether, which becomes a billabong.  The new course or shape alters the flow, which will change again downstream, creating another meander … and so on.  The cut-off curve naturally fills with sediment over time, changing depth and distance determining when and how often it reconnects with the river’s water. 

Reading billabongs in the framing of space as produced in social, material and discursive flows, these places offer an understanding of space and place which provides for difference, without stability or essence, and a dynamism  without insisting on linear movement or inevitability.  I suggest this characterization of billabongs affords a concept containing two important insights.  First, it offers a concept through which dominant flows ‘reified as stable ground in everyday life’ (as Dovey commented) can be explored for what they are: particular flows winding through multiple pasts and potential possibilities.  Second, the billabong is a spatial concept that produces room for a ‘simultaneity’ (Massey 1994; Foucault 1967) of multiple places outside the ‘mainstream’ and draws attention to their existence and importance.  In addition, these places also offer and indicate spaces for calm (perhaps even rest) in which to consider the intimacies of such places more honestly.  Bringing these insights together, I want to suggest that the site of the billabong offers the possibility both to challenge conceptions of space and place in Melbourne, and also to indicate places from which change can emerge while maintaining an honesty and intimacy. [2] 

Previous spaces, layers of social and material relations, exist as sediments in these billabong places.  In this framework, we can understand the Woiworung habitation in the Melbourne area as a billabong or many billabongs.  We can also recognise industrial Richmond as a billabong.  In recent times, relations and a recognition of both these billabongs have been flushed into the mainstream creating both opportunities and anxieties in the public consciousness.  If these places were recognised as billabongs, such perceived ‘contamination’ may be better accommodated and possibly discussed differently.  Although this framework holds both Indigenous habitation and Melbourne’s initial industrial development together, albeit shakily, I do not wish to present them as equal or equivalent.  The work that ‘billabongs’ can do simply assists a process.  It does not provide determinations.  I believe Indigenous rights are of more importance than the consequences of uneven white settlement and should be visited first and foremost.  Held together, nonetheless, in a string of billabongs, there is potential to bring Indigenous self determination into the mainstream of Australian society, while not excluding (associated) issues of class. 

Nor am I advocating an apartheid or ‘caging’ (Hage 1998, pp. 105-16) reaction to difference.  With porous and eroding banks, with no possibility of grounding, apartheid schema are impossible to realise and violent to attempt.  Nor do I suggest not attempting to unsettle the mainstream.  I simply wish to suggest that recognising ‘billabongs’ in our world offers a space for a strategic politics that may be less easily appropriated or rejected than working in the mainstream directly.  I believe Tony Birch is writing of much the same idea when he writes ‘I want to find ways that enable interconnected stories located in the “contact zone” of a shared existence to reveal themselves to us.  Such an idea … [f]or me is also a strategic and political decision’ (Birch 2005a, p. 199).   What I am developing here may offer one possibility for creating interconnected billabongs located within the flows of shared existences.  According to Birch, such an activity requires an ethics which is committed to the difficult work of producing honest representations, even if they are not immediately useful (Birch 2005b).

As places that are returned to, places which revisit us, billabongs also attract an appreciation of responsibility.  Flows are not linear streamlines to liberation.  In concluding a reflective essay on the ‘Another View’ Walking Trail, Brian Morris (2001, p. 99) argues that although mainstream spectacles of Indigenous history and culture such as performances, flags and reconciliation events

constitute important political statements, they tend to overshadow a consideration of the everyday (in)visibility of ‘Aboriginality’ in the central city and the more sedimentary history of the Indigenous habitation of the central city space [emphasis original]. 

Paul Sinclair (2001, p. 15) also demonstrates the importance of attempting to grasp and value what he calls the ‘truth in the mundane’.  It is my hope that a consideration of billabongs may move us to recognise more thoughtfully some of what is currently (in)visible.  Moreover, the process can be undertaken with more sensitivity to particularities and does not feel an impulse to crush them into a ‘contained “mix”’ (Dovey & Woodcock 2005, p. 109).  By recognising the partiality of a billabongs relationship to flows, it allows for participation without domination.

We also must be attuned to the slower, creeping flows which maintain the banks and levies between billabong places.  Ghassan Hage (2000, p. 31) has developed the idea of an honourable space ‘where dominant modes of inhabitance are invited to yield to marginal modes of inhabitance’.  This is precisely how banks, temporary as they are, must be recognised and thickened.  Following Hage, it is by extending these ‘honourable spaces’ – offering them and clotting these banks between flows – that society constitutes itself as honourable, and allows for the possibility that marginalised ways of living might at some point be recognised and sustained in the mainstream.  The stories of three visits to billabongs on the Yarra bring attention to some opportunities I have encountered.

Visiting Billabongs [3]

Herring Island

As noted above, Herring Island was constructed during the ‘improvement’ of the Yarra in the early twentieth century. In 1928 the sides of Richmond Quarry were blasted creating the island, which was almost immediately destroyed by the 1934 flood.  Since then, levee banks have been built and the island has grown with layers of silt from ongoing dredging (Parks Victoria 2005).  Today Herring Island is an Environment and Sculpture Park.  The site attempts to ground itself in a contemporary environmental discourse committed to ‘conservation’, ‘restoration’ and ‘re-establishing’ ‘indigenous vegetation’ (Parks Victoria 2005). 

Figure 4: ‘Falling Fence’

Figure 5: ‘A hill a River, two rocks and a presence’

Nevertheless, the Island itself remains clearly ‘sculpted’.  Piles of discarded non-Indigenous vegetation line the paths, waiting to be stuffed into bags and taken to the jetty for collection.  The River is barely visible from the main recreational area on the small Island due to high banks of silt and rock held together by wire.  The sculptures embedded in the landscape add to the feeling of the Island’s constructedness.  A recent installation Falling Fence provides no protection or boundary from the river.  Rather its independent posts twist and tilt down to the River.  A hill a River, two rocks and a presence is difficult to discern from its surroundings, an effect achieved by it composition from local materials. Like much of the island it is slowing being eroded and overlaid by moss and leaves, inevitably decaying attempts at ‘conservation’.

Chinese Market Gardens

The presence of Chinese market gardeners and their gardens on the Yarra’s banks from Richmond to Kew from the 1850 to 1930s are noted in many histories of the Yarra (Lacey 2004; McCalman 1984; Otto 2005).  More often than not, however, Chinese immigrants were, and in some cases continue to be, associated with degeneration, disease and opium dens (McCalman 1984;  see also Grant & Serle 1978).  Nevertheless, these gardeners produced nearly the only fresh vegetables in Melbourne, supplying the entire city from cane baskets swung across their shoulders (Clements 1986).  Along with many other things, and like Herring Island, these Chinese gardening communities were destroyed by the 1934 flood.  Against the cultural and material efforts to centralise the nation during the Second World War these communities did not return (Clements 1986).  Unlike Herring Island, these communities have not been ‘restored’.  In many Australian cities, Chinatowns have been ‘contrived’ (Anderson 1993) for political legitimacy within the discourse of multiculturalism, and for late capitalist consumption of difference.  Perhaps this billabong could be an interesting site to visit for stories of Chinese communities in Melbourne outside the mainstream of multiculturalism and consumption.

Figure 6: ‘Miasma’ threatening the Yarra

Speaker’s Corner

The banks of the Lower Yarra have always been sites for public debate and dissent.  From the 1890s depression to the 1950s, communists, feminists, anarchists and the religious took to the Yarra Banks to protest and hold regular Sunday talks.  In the late 1890s, Alfred Deakin spearheaded moves to concentrate ‘the dangerous radicals away from the general population of the metropolis’ (Otto 2005, p. 131), onto the North Bank (so much for Catani’s a ‘beautiful promenade … where all classes could meet’!).  By the early twentieth century, despite protests through the city, Deakin succeeded (Peters 1998).

The largest crowd to gather occurred in 1915 when 100,000 met to protest against conscription.  Today this history of ‘free speech and dissent’ is recognised by Speakers’ Corner in the Birrarung Marr parkland on the North bank behind Federation Square.  Eight speaker’s mounds were replanted in 2001, with granite engravings placed throughout the area.  ‘Feed on our flesh and blood you capitalist hyenas, it is your funeral feast’, first painted on a banner for the May Day rally in 1890 (Peters 1998, p. 11) is now engraved on shallow steps in the centre of Speakers’ Corner. 

Opened in 2001, Birrarung Marr was designed to accommodate large crowds and streams of people (Tourism Victoria 2005).  It is mostly used, however, for corporate and programmed events, remaining rather quiet at other times (Dovey & Woodcock 2005).  Nevertheless, like those who may come across sites on the ‘Another View’ trail, those who wander through Speakers’ Corner, or rest there may reflect on the history of the place: how a billabong that echoes ‘The Prime Minister’s light is Australia’s darkness’ might survive in spite of recent attempts to curtail free speech under sedition laws, and strip workers of all rights under ‘work choices’ legislation.

Conclusion

John Wedge, one of the first British surveyors to visit Woiworung country, named the river running through the area ‘The Yarra’.  He chose this name after overhearing Woiworung people describing the flowing and cascading of the river’s water as ‘Yarra Yarra’.  In naming this flow, Wedge mistook a process for a place, an act that has yet to be remedied.  I have attempted to provide one possibility for understanding the Yarra as a process of change and possibility.  I have suggested that spaces are produced by flows of people, materials and stories.  These flows are generated by desires that remain unfulfilled often struggling against ever-changing currents.  In part framed by this understanding, the billabong provides also a place to take stock and strengthen the possibilities for honest, responsible and strategic research and action.  The three contemporary stories of urban environmentalism, multiculturalism and class relations that I have concluded with here are encounters with billabongs that I hope may find their way back to the Yarra and offer new spaces for rest, reflection and change.

NOTES