It was a warm night. I was two blocks into my six-block return walk, Helen by my side, and the streets were empty. (Helen is a failed greyhound staying with us for a few weeks. Failed as in racing, not as in being a greyhound. At being a greyhound she is quite competent.)
Nothing in the air tonight except the occasional muffled ramp of a distant tram in Sydney Road and the soft rush of a city train on the down line.
This neighbourhood was built in the 1940s for artisans and tradesmen who wanted to work where they lived. House blocks combined a residence with a small factory or workshop: cup of tea in the morning and five minutes later you're planing a piece of mountain ash or cutting some leather for a car seat. There are still several small factories, a couple of old warehouses with car parts hanging from dark ceilings like carcasses in butchers' shops, a bird boarding house that used to be something else, and a couple of print factories that clatter by day and fall silent by night.
Some of the houses even have their aging original owners, while others are being reclaimed from decades-long disuse. In recent years home buyers have moved in from suburbs where prices are nudging a million dollars, and here they regard the semi-industrial 'vibe' - as they call it – as hip.
Helen and I walked on. We turned a corner. The largest factory came into view. It used to make cheese. It had hummed for forty-odd years. Milk obtained from fat Jerseys on Gippsland hillsides had been trucked in by night in large mirrored-silver McColl's tankers.
But the new home buyers did not want the factory near their new houses. The funky industrial 'vibe' turned out to be an attitude, an affectation. It was phony. Perhaps they did not like cheese factories. Or factories period. Or cheese period. I don't know. You can't second-guess anyone's motivations. You can ask them, but even then you don't know if what they tell you is the truth.
So the funky industrial 'vibe' people got up petitions and signed letters and stuck exclamation-marked posters on their retro gateposts – CHEESE OUT! NOW! NO FACTORIES FOR NOCO! NO MORE MIDNIGHT TRUCKS! – and got themselves on the cover of the local paper standing outside the factory blocking their ears, their children pulling Edvard Munch faces. Some white-gumbooted cheese factory employees could be seen standing glumly in the background – 'What am I going to do after working in a cheese factory for forty years? Make coffees in hipster cafes?' – but the blocked-ear mob won the argument when the factory closed down for good in February this year. In the end it wasn't the protests, but because the owner decided to rationalise manufacturing into a regional plant; but the vibe people nevertheless chalked themselves up a moral victory. So much for locavores. You can lead a milk truck to a hipster but you can't make him drink.
We were halfway past the abandoned factory on the opposite side of the street, passing two of the original-resident houses. They were next to each other. I've seen the owners in their two respective front gardens; stooped, aged, gloved, secateur-wielding. The first house had a six-foot brick wall at the front. I peered over it. Fifty or maybe a hundred rose bushes were rioting in their own special patch of sunlight. Yellows, reds, whites, pinks; bushes and standards. The woman was there now. She didn't see me. She was doing something with an old battered watering can. The second house had a low fence and a cossetted 1980s car in the drive and a garden full of ornamentals kept on a tight leash; staked and tied-up peonies and foxgloves and tall daisies, topiaried this and that; rosemary, lavender, small flowering shrubs. I've seen the old man tying up his plants. He always looks like he's arresting a bunch of pretty criminals.
We walked on. Why, why, why? I said to Helen. Why were the old couple content to live across the road from a factory for forty years, when the new arrivals a block or two away were onto its case after five minutes? Why did the old people not take part in the protest with the vibe people? After all, they were right across the road. They'd be affected most by the midnight truck. Maybe they had worked there.
Helen didn't answer.
Nothing in the air tonight except the occasional muffled ramp of a distant tram in Sydney Road and the soft rush of a city train on the down line.
This neighbourhood was built in the 1940s for artisans and tradesmen who wanted to work where they lived. House blocks combined a residence with a small factory or workshop: cup of tea in the morning and five minutes later you're planing a piece of mountain ash or cutting some leather for a car seat. There are still several small factories, a couple of old warehouses with car parts hanging from dark ceilings like carcasses in butchers' shops, a bird boarding house that used to be something else, and a couple of print factories that clatter by day and fall silent by night.
Some of the houses even have their aging original owners, while others are being reclaimed from decades-long disuse. In recent years home buyers have moved in from suburbs where prices are nudging a million dollars, and here they regard the semi-industrial 'vibe' - as they call it – as hip.
Helen and I walked on. We turned a corner. The largest factory came into view. It used to make cheese. It had hummed for forty-odd years. Milk obtained from fat Jerseys on Gippsland hillsides had been trucked in by night in large mirrored-silver McColl's tankers.
But the new home buyers did not want the factory near their new houses. The funky industrial 'vibe' turned out to be an attitude, an affectation. It was phony. Perhaps they did not like cheese factories. Or factories period. Or cheese period. I don't know. You can't second-guess anyone's motivations. You can ask them, but even then you don't know if what they tell you is the truth.
So the funky industrial 'vibe' people got up petitions and signed letters and stuck exclamation-marked posters on their retro gateposts – CHEESE OUT! NOW! NO FACTORIES FOR NOCO! NO MORE MIDNIGHT TRUCKS! – and got themselves on the cover of the local paper standing outside the factory blocking their ears, their children pulling Edvard Munch faces. Some white-gumbooted cheese factory employees could be seen standing glumly in the background – 'What am I going to do after working in a cheese factory for forty years? Make coffees in hipster cafes?' – but the blocked-ear mob won the argument when the factory closed down for good in February this year. In the end it wasn't the protests, but because the owner decided to rationalise manufacturing into a regional plant; but the vibe people nevertheless chalked themselves up a moral victory. So much for locavores. You can lead a milk truck to a hipster but you can't make him drink.
We were halfway past the abandoned factory on the opposite side of the street, passing two of the original-resident houses. They were next to each other. I've seen the owners in their two respective front gardens; stooped, aged, gloved, secateur-wielding. The first house had a six-foot brick wall at the front. I peered over it. Fifty or maybe a hundred rose bushes were rioting in their own special patch of sunlight. Yellows, reds, whites, pinks; bushes and standards. The woman was there now. She didn't see me. She was doing something with an old battered watering can. The second house had a low fence and a cossetted 1980s car in the drive and a garden full of ornamentals kept on a tight leash; staked and tied-up peonies and foxgloves and tall daisies, topiaried this and that; rosemary, lavender, small flowering shrubs. I've seen the old man tying up his plants. He always looks like he's arresting a bunch of pretty criminals.
We walked on. Why, why, why? I said to Helen. Why were the old couple content to live across the road from a factory for forty years, when the new arrivals a block or two away were onto its case after five minutes? Why did the old people not take part in the protest with the vibe people? After all, they were right across the road. They'd be affected most by the midnight truck. Maybe they had worked there.
Helen didn't answer.
Are you all OK? I've been seeing the news about the fires. Very sorry to hear it.
ReplyDeleteMelbourne is freezing - the heat is well north of the Great Dividing Range. All the usual arguments down here about who's to blame - global warming for heating the place up, or the Greens for not allowing any undergrowth clearing.
ReplyDelete