Land battles: Hardy-Gallagher Park

 

Just south of the Brunswick border is a small tract of bushland, a bocce court, a railway station with no train line, a children’s playground. This enchanted pocket of parkland is the meeting place of a number of intertwining stories. It used to be part of the Inner Circle line. The station building is now a Neighbourhood House. The bocce court is a memorial to an adventurous Italian immigrant, but the park itself owes its existence to a struggle and confrontation between the community and short sighted interests.

Capital Trail: Brunswick to Docklands

  

 

View towards Ross Straw Field

It was a beautiful morning. We headed down the Capital Trail, past the Zoo, through wonderful and threatened Royal Park and along the pathway next to Moonee Ponds Creek. First of all, it is but a swamp, like a forgotten wasteland under the concrete flyovers of the freeway. Then, it widens and becomes a small creek. With bridges, drains, industrial landscapes. But today, so beautiful.  A couple of men were fishing. A train stopped at Macauley Station. And I managed to capture a few wonderful sights. Hard to believe it is in the heart of a big city.

Methven Park

This is a small park just off Lygon Street, with magnificent old elm trees and a path that winds through it from one corner to the other, causing the beholder to wonder: where did it used to lead to? Surely not just from one street to the next? The destination and the story have disappeared.

Luscombe Street Community Garden

Not quite a year ago, I chanced upon a lively street festival in a small street off Lygon Street. Bands were playing in a vacant block, which also had garden boxes full of the last summer vegetables growing in them. The festival was called Hot Diggity, and today it was on again. Only this time, there was a little street market and I had a stall there.

The Brunswick Trugo Club

The sign on the gate says it all: Elderly Citizens. A recent article in the Age Good Weekend described Trugo as “Seniors Game on”, however it seems a great game for children. Certainly on the fine Sunday afternoon when I attended a social event at the Brunswick Trugo Club, the children were revelling in the lush green grass of the pitch and enjoying hitting the rubber wheel and generally making up their own rules.