The kids lead me into this incredible magical world they’ve been exploring and mapping. Now that I stop and look around, the sound of the highway fades, and I see how pretty it is... the water gushing over rocks, the dark trunks of the wattle against the electric green of soursob carpeting everything.Kyla Brettle
LISTEN TO
Significant Roadside Area: Exploring the world through a child's eyes
SBS Audio
27/05/202419:28
In this episode of Everything We Need
Paul Foreman, Uncle Rick Nelson, Daryl Corliss and Kyla's children Arlo and Ffion.
Credits
Written, Recorded, Edited and Produced by Kyla Brettle
Music by Rob Law with Uncle Paul Chapman playing didgeridoo
Additional Landscape Recordings by Andrew Skeoch, Listening Earth
Production Photography by Carmen Bunting
Produced for Endgame Podcast with the support of ADAPT Loddon Mallee
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Transcript
Kyla Brettle, Narrator:
Close to my house, on the edge of the highway, there’s a remnant patch of bush with a creek running through - there used to be a sign, announcing rather importantly that this is a ‘Significant Roadside Area’.
I live in Barkers Creek on Djaara Country in Victoria’s Central Goldfields, Australia.
I thought of the sign as somewhat ironic; it isn’t much more than a traffic island of bush - a stitch on the highway near an impermanent creek - I drive past it most days, taking the kids to school or to the shops - thinking tomorrow we’ll make time to ride in on the e-bike.
So - I live next door - but I don’t know this tiny bushland reserve well - and I hadn’t thought much about it until the kids dragged me down there to record the frogs…
(Kyla) Alright Let’s go…
And I discovered - not just the common eastern froglet - but a crack in the fabric of the universe - that my children have been visiting for some time
Children
Ffion: Sometimes you don’t know how high it is and it reaches up to your pants. We are at the river - and we’re going to cross the river now… It’s squelchy
Arlo: So, We’re going down this steep track and -
Ffion: it’s really cold
Arlo: I call this the leap of faith - it’s quite steep - my feet are cold
Ffion: You don’t want to wake up the snakes
Arlo: and - there are these omega giant thorns just between the path - all in the name of adventuration [sic] and exploration…
Kyla
The kids lead me into this incredible magical world they’ve been exploring and mapping - and now that I stop and look around - the sound of the highway fades - I see how pretty it is - the water gushing over rocks, the dark trunks of the wattle again the electric green of soursob carpeting everything
(Children) Arlo: I haven’t eaten it in ages.
Ffion: and it has flowers at the end but you can't eat the flowers
I remember sucking on this stuff as a kid and going winky and wriggly - we used to call it sour flower…
And all of this got me thinking about little bits of nowhere that exist in the spaces between human development - like this Barkers Creek reserve - And how we each read and see different things in these landscapes - And what else might be significant about this roadside area…
(Kyla) So, can you tell me what you had for breakfast (Paul Foreman) Porridge and banana
Paul Foreman is a local ecologist - with an interest in restoring damaged landscapes -
(Kyla) I’ll just get my levels
I asked him to come down to Barkers Creek and describe it, as he sees it….
Paul Foreman
People think about landscapes mainly in the here and now. You know, here we are at a landscape and we think about, well, what's here? You know, what's over there and what's, what's behind us And so on. So there's a real natural impulse to explore the area in, in space. Um, but the other thing that we, we tend not to do so much is think about how do we poke around in time…
How do we think about what was here last week and last year and last decade, last century, and then what that means for whether or not this system is stable, whether or not it's healthy, whether or not we need to do something more to avert some crisis that might be pending
Kyla
Paul takes be back in time - to a cataclysmic event that shaped this bushland reserve and the lives of everything in it.
Paul Foreman
(Paul) We can jump cross here
(Kyla) I'm good with my boots here
We're on the other side of the creek now and it's a slightly inclined slope. So we we're heading up towards the, the lower ridges and those are the areas that heavily hit by gold mining and other activities Historically
(Paul) that looks like another shaft there, I'd say by the shape of that, um,
It's possible there could even be s sluiced areas too…
(Paul) chucked all the mullock next door somewhere.
They used to use these hydraulic guns, water guns, and fire up against the soil and just dissolve it into a slurry and then process the slurry to extract the gold. And so I, I suspect that this gouged out and uneven landscape we can see in front of us is a result of all that
Kyla
In the 1850s - tens of thousands of people arrived to turn this place over in their search for gold - I try to visualise the extent of the impact caused by the twin powers of colonisation and mining.
Paul Foreman
Just Flattened. Yeah, so all the trees are gone. All the understory is gone. You know, floods would happen after rainfall events, and because there was no vegetation left, the whole place was unstable. And so all the sludge would get go surging down the, the drainage lines and the creeks.
It would infill mine shafts and bury infrastructure and go out onto farmland sometimes and bury people's paddocks and wreck bridges and roads. It was such a bad situation. It was such a disaster that there was no fresh water for people to drink. So they were carting in from, you know, tens of kilometres away.
Like I think from the Campaspi River, across to Bendigo. And you can imagine the amount of money that people were charging to get access to that water. You can imagine what it would've been like.
Uncle Rick Nelson
Down here? Yeah we go down here - We all need water… the grass and the plants and animals - water giver life…
Kyla
Uncle Rick Nelson is a Dja Dja Wurrung Elder and cultural advisor -
Uncle Rick Nelson
Yeah, 70% of cultural sites are found within 20 or 30 up to a hundred meters of water. People didn't camp very far away from water, you know, there'd be fish and water birds and various bush tucker and that around
Kyla
This Country is the dreaming place of Uncle Rick’s ancestors - the Djaara people, who managed the environment for millennia before it was taken by white settlers
Uncle Rick Nelson
Dja Dja Wurrung were known at the Loddon River people. So yeah, I like being near the water, like near the creeks and rivers. Not the ocean, but the creeks and rivers. This one's a bit close to the road.
Kyla
I asked Uncle Rick about what this Country used to be like - and the ways people once lived here
Uncle Rick Nelson
It would've been beautiful country before the gold come, and they trashed it.
So there was big old trees, not these little things. Uh, Only 75 or so years old, you know, it would've been 500 and 700 and a thousand year old. So big old trees, big canopies, lush undergrowth. There was open grasslands as well. It just wasn't all wooded country. And um, and a couple of your explorers talk about coming over the hill and as far as you could see, there's fields of yellow.
Where the yam daisies or, or the yam, daisies. And the men were going off through the red gum forest to go hunting, and the women were digging the yams up. He talked about you could spear your hand into the ground and it would go up past your wrist, that the soil was that rich.
But, you know, people would follow the, the food resources. They just read things in, in the environment, in the night sky. Like there’s Mallee fowl - and, and in the winter he's like over in this sky and throughout the year he'll move over here and then in the summer he's in this guy, and that means the eggs are ready to go and collect. So, yeah, and that was the way I lived
Children
Arlo: the winding paths, I’ve mentally mapped them. So there’s that cliff I was talking about - i you fall off there you’ll get a nasty shock
Kyla
I traipse after my kids thinking about how stories of people and place are so deeply entwined - and how the value we see in an environment shapes the way we treat it - and even comes to define our relationship with it
Children
Arlo: So the river, um, goes paralleling the highway and then like the highway it turns at what I call the joy stretch. And then it's got another stretch, which I call the Trickle Way. And the Trick Stretch.
I like exploring it. And what I, I really like just running around free.
Ffion: I like, um, trying to find four leaf clovers because there's lots of clovers around.
Kyla Brettle
I notice that someone’s been trying to care for this reserve recently - there are a few tree guards dotted about and I peer in on some struggling grasses and shrubs
(Kyla) What can you see? A tiny little plant? Maybe there's nothing in there now. What do you think?
(Daryl Colless): I”m thinking maybe….
Daryl Colless is the president of the BC Landcare and wildlife group that put them there
(Daryl Colless) What’s probably happened there is that that's been eaten down, but it's not killed it off. That's good. It's good that that survived
The group meet once a month to weed and plant on this and other sites in the area - it’s difficult to grow here – there’s virtually no topsoil, plants have to be hand watered to get through summer and everything needs to be protected from the rabbits
(Daryl Colless) : And see how some of the states have gone. Oh, now this is good. This is bus aria isn't it? Busaria is apparently one of the best metal plants for the copper butterfly.
(Kyla) Which is currently endangered.
(Daryl) Yes, of course. Dare I say, what isn't?
When I ask Daryl what he sees when he looks onto this landscape - he remembers when this little patch of country was unrecognisable and almost completely taken over by invasive woody weeds
Daryl Colless
The Broom filled this entire area. So we are talking what? It's probably at least an acre that was just full of broom and the broom was over your head high. If not one and a half times the height of someone standing there. So the original Landcare group started to remove all of that, and it took them years and at one point they even got the, uh, hard court CFA to come along and to supervise a massive big burn off.
Kyla
It’s not just desire for the things we value that changes the world around us - it’s shaped by neglect and our ability to ignore what’s in front of us.
Daryl Colless
Yep. We'll use that for as a dump. So we'll put the hard court tip out. In Barker’s Creek somewhere. People would actually bring their rubbish and, uh, there's a hole. I'll just fill it with rubbish rather than going to the tip. Plus, there was even a group who wanted to use. Part of the Barkers Creek area. For waste, dump,
Children
Ffion: What do we call this one Arlo?
Arlo: Alge? What?
Ffion: This
Arlo: Oh that - there are certain names for it, slobbersquatch is the best
Ffion: Slobbersquatch
Paul Foreman
It's a kind of an industrial wasteland in, in many respects because it's been turned over and cut over and trumped on. And. Just simply left it, and this is what's come back. And it's remarkable that a lot of native plants and animals have persisted at all.
Children
Arlo: I never like going through, um, grasslands
Ffion: because I have blackberries?
Arlo: I’m always worried I'm gonna be attacked by snake in one of them
Uncle Rick Nelson
You're teaching that one stomping the grass and the snakes can feel the vibrations. Yeah. You gotta teach 'em that one
Children
Arlo: they’ll be sleeping, but I still don't like going through it
Ffion: You don't want to wake up the snakes
Kyla
When I was the age my kids are now - and cracks in the fabric of the universe (were easy to find) seemed more common - I had no trouble believing the future would mould itself to my imagination - and with this power I could transform the world around me for the better - I just never questioned what side of history I’d be on
Children
Arlo: This is the last barrier, if you can make it though here we'll be there
Ffion: Some spiders, um, might live here.
Arlo: Oh, there's a spider one
Ffion: Some spiderwebs you can’t see
Paul Foreman
Do you wanna, I'll just, we'll go over here a bit further. I can show you some of the, um, plants that are sort of hanging on now. …We’re in a different moment, a different decade, and with the added impact of climate change,
Kyla
Ecologist Paul Foreman brings me back to the present - and what he sees as significant about this bushland reserve.
Paul Foreman
So if you had a really intact, healthy system -and climate change came along - it probably could ride that out, to a degree. But because the system is damaged and unhealthy it’s just not able to respond in the same way it has in the past - the baseline has drifted lower - and yet the challenge is pretty enormous.
Kyla
Paul explains that this patch of bush is losing biodiversity and is no longer able to regenerate here. Like everywhere else, life as we know it will collapse without decisive human intervention.
Paul Foreman
I think that we need to be a lot more honest and sober about what actually we need to do, the threats and the issues that we'd need to tackle and we need to tackle head on. Because if we don't, that objective of actually keeping these things we value will will not be achieved.
Kyla
This is an uncomfortable reminder that I need to do more about the crisis and tell stories about the past and the values and motivations that got us here. More than ring my hands over global inaction and expect my kids to sort out the mess.
(Kyla:) And like you say, it's about, it's about being open-eyed and not trying to kind of perpetuate a toxic hope. Yeah. But without, you know, getting into collapse porn.
(Paul:) Yes, I know. That can be, um, yeah. I, I think we're all vulnerable to that from time to time, aren't we? But as long as you come out the other side, you don't get locked into it.You know what I mean?
(Kyla:) Yeah,
Paul: Because we need everybody all hands on deck.
(Kyla:) Yeah.
(Paul:) Be poised to, to, to do your bit.
(Kyla:)Yeah.
(Paul:) And I think that's the big thing, isn't it? How do you know what your bit is?
(Kyla:) Yes!
(Paul:) So, so there's those big, um, grass tuss I was mentioning there, so, yep. They're called po. Um, and it gives you a bit of a flavor of, of what used to be here. It gives you a bit of a picture of what could be here. Certainly water place for restoration.
Kyla
I arrive at the special place that my kids want me to see and - set up to record the frogs - they tell me I can use the sound to help protect endangered species….
Children
Arlo: Okay, now we're here. This beautiful little, um, water. Glade
Ffion: we’re at the joy stretch.
Arlo: A nice little, um, hollow little fairy kingdom.
Ffion: We can see green grass with these little pine thingies, like little sticks - like having a barbecue, but um, the marshmallows are really thin, like sausages
Arlo: so you can just sit here, watch the river, the sun can come through there, lighting it up.
Kyla
I press record and lie back in the grass. The sun warms my eyelids and the earth and feels cool and solid beneath me. I remember Uncle Ricks words and begin to imagine different ways my own story could, might and will entwine with where I live, on this significant roadside area.
Uncle Rick Nelson
You got to look after the environment, you have to look after where you live - otherwise there’ll be nothing left and we’ll all die - to put it bluntly - I think - that is just common sense … you don‘t chop half your house down to keep warm - look after the country and it will look after you back - to help you heal yourself.
__________
I’m Kyla Brettle and this work was written, recorded edited and produced my me on Djaara Country, lands that were never needed and I pay my respects to First Nations elders past and present.
Many thanks to those whose voices you heard - Paul Foreman, Uncle Rick Nelson, Daryl Corliss and my two beautiful children, Arlo and Ffion.
In the show you also heard original music by Rob Law with didgeridoo played by Uncle Paul Chapman. Additional Landscape recordings by Andrew Skeoch and the label, Listening Earth. Also thanks to Carmen Bunting for production Photography.
This work was originally produced for Endgame Podcast with support from ADAPT Loddon Mallee.
ye for now.
