a place you love

written 20240906.

“think and write about a place you love and how it appears in your heart and life.”

the floodway starts from somewhere up the mountain at the western edge of my hometown. i have no idea where. the mountain is covered in dense bushland, the water could be flowing down from any one of its inaccessible gullies. you can’t start at the other end and make your way upstream to figure it out either. further up from where it meets the river the floodway is steep and overgrown. you’d have to push your way through ferns and invasive wattles, and to try keep your footing on the slippery rocks.

and so from wherever it rises to where it ends, the floodway follows its hidden route behind sheds and backyards, through interstitial bushland and wasteland, and under roads. when i lived here, i could climb the plane tree out the front of the house, or get up onto the roof, and look out at the mountain across the town. between there and here, the invisible watercourse.

i’m more familiar with two particular sections of the floodway. the first is a little ways up from the river, where it passes beneath an alleyway connecting two dead end streets at the far end of the neighbourhood. the alleyway branches off the footpath, and descends between a heavily graffitied wooden fence and chickenwire threaded with tall weeds. at the bottom, it diverts around another pair of houses, one of which had an aggressive dog, and then emerges out the other side, an unfamiliar part of town.

before that, in the in-between, the alleyway crosses the floodway. it is fenced off. there is a locked metal gate with the usual sign you see around stormwater drains, with the icon of the drowning person and the warning that floodwaters rise quickly. you can’t get down there from here, but you can at least look through the wire, down at the piping that exits one side and enters the other, below that the creepers and ferns that manage fine in this moist, dark place, and below all that, less seen than heard, the trickling water.

the second section is where the floodway meets the river. growing up, it was almost impassable. i remember how the grass reached well overhead on either side of the trail. if you wanted to cross the floodway, your only option this far down was to divert alongside it for ten or twenty metres and cross it there.

there was a wooden structure built over the water, here. you could sidle your way into it, carefully pick your way across the brick ledges by the water, and at the narrowest point make a little leap across and pick your way back out. i call this structure the flood chamber.

inside you could just see the brickwork. the water was shadow - except at the centre of the chamber where it reflected light as it disappeared into a pit, how far down who knew, and the sound of it gurgling as it went down echoing off the walls.

we only ever crossed by way of this structure when i was very little, and for years after i supposed i had actually just imagined the whole thing. for a long time this stretch of the riverside was left to grow unchecked. the sliver of open trail was overtaken by blackberry bushes. then people who lived nearby tried to claim the whole impassable length of it by putting in fences all the way down to the waterline.

a couple decades later, visiting home, i went exploring and came back here. the council had reclaimed the river, hacked back the vegetation and put in a low concrete bridge. i stood in the middle of it and looked back through the trees up the floodway, and saw still there, collapsing under the weight of fallen branches and accumulated leaf litter, the flood chamber.

i suspect this neglected waterway is directly responsible for my obsession with decaying things, with structures that are sinking back into the earth, with dark places. i write a lot of things set in exclusion zones and wastelands. at the centre of all that, possibly, is an attempt to recapitulate how it felt to be in a place like that, warm weather and the rest of the world just a couple metres away across a ledge of slippery brickwork - and a gurgling pit.

exploring the mountain near my apartment (a different mountain) i came across an erosion gully with a little trickling stream. this one had a trail running alongside it though, and i was able to follow it all the way downstream. i almost expect to find collapsed, decaying, forgotten places along these sorts of strands. there’s a lot of pits and hollows and ruins in the area, i know now.

instead, the stream emptied into a pond filled with frogsong, that only quietened a little as i came alongside. i was a little disappointed, but maybe a little relieved too.