Into the swamp

Enclosing capital

Featured in

  • Published 20230502
  • ISBN: 978-1-922212-83-2
  • Extent: 264pp
  • Paperback (234 x 153mm), eBook

MOST EVENINGS, WE walk through the wetlands taking shape within a hundred-­year-­old golf course in Elwood in Melbourne’s south-­east. In 2018, community activists persuaded Bayside council that the poorly patronised Elsternwick Golf Club could be rewilded, restoring, in the words of the architectural plan, a ‘native parkland, wetland and urban forest…that echo the beauty of the land before the invasion of concrete and asphalt…and provide refuge and tranquillity for people and wildlife’. Some of that beauty can already be found in the partly completed Yalukit Willam Nature Reserve.

After work, we go down from Glen Huntly Road where the clubhouse once stood, across the linked billabongs flowing over the old greens and then around a lake originally designed as a water trap. In the trees, viridescent rainbow and musk lorikeets chitter and shrill. Red-­rumped parrots forage in the grass; wood ducks shepherd their young past the strutting swamp hens. Occasionally, a rakali cuts a V-­shaped ripple through the lake with its white-­tipped tail. A Murray short-­necked turtle – a released pet, we think – basks on a log, while, in the ponds, a long-­necked turtle surfaces, startling the common galaxias needling in and out of weeds. Sometimes we hear a Peron’s tree frog or a pobblebonk: the first gives a rattling growl, the second a plonk like a banjo string. And every day, the seedlings – blue devil, common woodruff, purple loosestrife, large river buttercup, yellow bulbine – spread a little further in a soil still expelling a century of wayward golf balls.

Already a subscriber? Sign in here

If you are an educator or student wishing to access content for study purposes please contact us at griffithreview@griffith.edu.au

Share article

More from author

More from this edition

A Little Box 

PoetryAnd didn’t I grant you  six identical faces, each perfectly plain as the other  and a sturdy mouth to clasp shut?

Everybody loves beginnings

Non-fictionBeginnings are a breaking of silence that give some indication as to why the silence ought to have been broken, and the prospects of such a breaking. Why should I have broken my silence and begun this discourse? And why should the difficulties of breaking this silence, difficulties that for some reason I must enact in order to ameliorate, appear so manifestly predictable to me?

Back to the red earth

FictionBefore she opens her eyes, she knows with the very same certainty that she is of this land that Juanjo, her lover and the father of her five guris, isn’t going to be asleep by her side. But she could for once be wrong. So, she stretches out her arm and feels around. Instead, her fingertips touch his perfectly tucked-­in bedsheet. His side of the bed is vacant like the rows of this year’s failed crop.

Stay up to date with the latest, news, articles and special offers from Griffith Review.