July 27, 2006
How do you walk home from the Melbourne CBD to Brunswick after work, and get some peace and quiet? Lygon Street is full of maddening touts, then further north it’s full of cars. Nicholson Street is just as bad for traffic, and even Rathdowne Street is pretty hectic.
The answer we found was Exhibition Gardens and Drummond Street. There’s hardly any traffic in Drummond Street, and you can wander through the Carlton housing estate, where there’s grass instead of bitumen.
The route is a cultural experience. Refugees from the Horn of Africa meander amidst the flats, and further north you meet people coming home from North Carlton’s Albanian mosque. These days the "Albanians" are black.
I felt so pleased with this solution. So naturally some bastard wants to put in a road.
The road will go right through the housing estate. It ‘ll cover 6000 square metres of open estate land, including a playground.
Not just that, it’ll divide residents. 3000 public tenants will be on the west side of the road. And after re-development, hundreds of private owners and renters will be on the east side. I don’t suppose they’ll pay too many visits to the mosque.
The road seems to be a plan to make the private flats more attractive. At whose expense?
The public housing flats are hardly a paradise. Some of them cry out for demolition, even if it does allow Yuppies to move in like sharks. Still, here’s another example of the logic of profit devouring things that matter. Putting another bit of the planet in a bitumen straight-jacket, flogging it to the passing trade.
But wait - it turns out to be an example of resistance, too. As we walked through tonight, there were signs saying "Stop the Road!" The Melbourne Times reports a public protest. Hey, I haven’t sat down in front of a bulldozer for years - what a great idea.
Err, well, we’re still at the planning stage. Maybe public anger will make them back off.
Until it comes to the bulldozer stuff, I’ll keep walking along Drummond Street, thinking to myself what a political mosaic can lurk within a simple fragment of everyday life.
August 3, 2006
Victorian Housing Minister Candy Broad has overturned plans to build a road through the centre of the Carlton housing estate, the Melbourne Times reports.
She announced the decision only hours before a protest by estate residents and workers against the road, which would have resulted in the loss of a children's playground and placed an estimated 8000 square metres of estate land "under tarmac". The road would have also been a barrier between children in the Lygon Street high-rise towers and Carlton Primary School.
Church of All Nations community support agency co-ordinator and organiser of Thursday's rally Steve Dobson, learned of Ms Broad's change of heart only 20 minutes before it was due to start. The rally went ahead as a show of solidarity.