Friends of Merri Creek have been conducting oral history interviews with residents who have lived on the Creek before 1970. The interviews form the Merri Creek Oral History Project.
This is an interview with Brendan Casey who lived near the Merri Creek in Lovely Street Fawkner in his youth.
The interviewer is Des Shiel. The date of the interview is 15 March 2014. The interview takes place at Clifton Hill in the interviewer’s home.
DS: Brendan could we start by getting some personal information about yourself? When and where were you born?
BC: I was born in Fawkner, the hospital was the hospital in Moreland Road Brunswick. Born in 1963, and I lived in Fawkner for around 20 years.
DS: Where were you actually living in Fawkner? And where was that in relation to the Creek?
BC: We lived in number two Lovely Street Fawkner which is near Sydney Road, it is down near Gowrie Station which is near Sydney Road. And as a youth it was probably a ten minute walk to the Merri Creek.
DS: And what years are we talking about now?
BC: I started playing along the Creek when I was a child, probably when I was about seven years old, so that puts it around 69-70. And I would have spent almost every weekend down there, especially in the warmer months for about three years.
DS: And your own family, how many were in the family?
BC: There were four boys and three girls..We all went to school at St. Matthew’s Primary School, and we were part of the large Irish Catholic community. We were part of the St. Matthews parish North Fawkner.
DS: Any others of your family play down the Creek?
BC: Yes, my older brother David used to come there with us a lot. And another fellow called Phillip Ward who lived across the road. The three of us would go down there together, and a little later my other brother would come along too.
DS: What was your father’s occupation?
BC: He had his own business as a builder. It was a small family construction company and my eldest brother and I were both apprenticed to him.
DS: On the demographics of the area, when you were young there. Was it working class, what were the occupations of the people?
BC: It was definitely a manual labour type of workforce. A lot of the people were involved in what I would describe as unskilled manual labour. Because we lived near the railway station, we had a lot of people who would ride their bikes from the other end of Fawkner and leave them at our house and then they would walk to the Gowrie train station. And I do recall a lot of the fellows used to bring their own shovel . They would ride to our house with their shovel on their bike and then they would get on the train and go to wherever they were working. It would seem in those days you would have to provide your own shovel.
DS: What is your occupation now?
BC: I work for the Bureau of Meteorology. In the Federal Public Service.
DS: I’d like to move now to the actual Creek area. When we were talking with you earlier, you said that probably the furthest south you went was around Bakers Road.
BC: Yes we strayed down there a couple of times, but I would consider that outside the area we used to play in.
DS: What were the main areas you played in?
BC: We would simply walk down to the end of Jukes Road until it terminated in the parkland there. So really the Merri Creek area around Jukes Road.
DS: So, a bit around Bakers Road to Jukes Road. Was the Connor Reserve there then?
BC: I don’ t recall that. I had some friends who lived near where the Moomba Park footy ground is now, so we probably spent most of our time at Jukes Road and up north , not quite as far as Mahoneys Road , that area along there where there were a lot of exposed basalt escarpments.
DS: And through to Galada Tamboore?
BC: Later on we started to ride our bikes up to Galada Tamboore. We always referred to it as the Barry Road Gorge. We would ride our bikes up Sydney Road, and then down Barry Road. So we never actually walked the Creek that length.
DS: So the access was you rode your bikes and went in?
BC: Yes
DS: Was the access easy?
BC: Very easy, it was all open, fencing was never an issue. There was very little rubbish dumped there at that time. Yes, it was all open and easily accessible, it was almost undisturbed. We rarely saw people there. We almost had the place to ourselves.
DS: How many kids were in your group, basically?
BC: There was my eldest brother David, another fellow Phillip Ward, later on another person called Stephen Cave joined us, but it was really just three or four of us. We would go down there and spend the whole day just playing in the Creek. Absolutely enchanted by all the creatures that we would come across in the Creek. There seemed to be an endless supply of them.
DS: So there weren’t many other local kids down the Creek?
BC: Not that we noticed. Later on more came when it became known there were abundant lizards down there. Other groups of children would go down and start collecting them. But certainly when we were little, we were the only ones down there. That’s as far as I know anyway.
DS: So you went after school and at weekends?
BC: No, it was mostly on the weekends. We would simply just wander off in the morning and come back at dinner time.
DS: Huckleberry Finn like?
BC: On reflection it certainly seems like that, yes. Very simple and very enjoyable.
DS: There wouldn’t be many kids wandering around there today.
BC: I don’t know what goes on there today. For years there was a real problem of rubbish dumping and car dumping and things like that, I don’t know what the kids of today make of it. It may well be they are too busy looking at their screens to bother going down the Creek, I don’t know. Perhaps it’s left alone these days again. Although I do now know large sections of that are now asphalt car parks. Especially at the end of Jukes Road.
DS: I would like to get a general idea of your memories of the Creek landscape. What was the quality of the grasslands, were there weeds etc?
BC: My remembrance of those places is I would almost describe them as pristine. Open basalt plains grasslands. It was very much dominated by large poa-like tussocks, I never really paid that much attention to the vegetation. I do remember some scrappy looking wattle trees and a few big old River Red Gums, I certainly don’t recall any thistles or willows, I don’t remember any willows. I didn’t really pay much attention to the types of plants, but it was very dominated by poa tussocks.
DS: What about the escarpments, were they mainly along the Creek?
BC: Yes, most of the escarpments were on the Reservoir side. Say from Jukes Road up to what is now Moomba Park footy ovals. I believe the ones on the Fawkner side are more or less intact. They have been revegetated and fenced. But there was almost a large continuous stretch of basalt escarpment. I would say at least 500 metres long.
DS: How high was it?
BC: Between one and four or five metres perhaps. And they were absolutely stuffed full of Cunningham’s Skinks. There were hundreds of them, which was the attraction why we spent the day there scrambling over them, because there were so many of these creatures.
DS: I will come back to the skinks later. In the Creek itself, what do you recall about the quality of the water?
BC: What I remember of the water quality was that it was pretty good. I don’t recall much algae. Further downstream it deteriorated a lot, probably in the mid seventies. But definitely around Barry Road, it was a lot cleaner and we could actually swim in there. We could swim in there all the time, there were waterholes that we swam in and we never got rashes or anything like that from it. In both Fawkner and around Campbellfield, you could look through the water column and see creatures living in the water, yabbies, fish and shrimp. All the different sorts of macro invertebrates, small galaxias. And you could see tadpoles, there were always lots of tadpoles. You could scoop your hand in there, and pluck these things out. Yes, so the water quality was very good. But it deteriorated, and later on we heard that there was a place on McBride Street near Major Road that was referred to as the Agent Orange factory. In the early seventies they were producing Agent Orange there, so I don’t know how much dioxin was released into the Creek. But certainly downstream from Major Road, the water quality did deteriorate quite dramatically. And subsequently, it did deteriorate very badly around Fawkner, but it remained pretty good around Campbellfield until I stopped going down there.
DS: You mentioned previously that you had been told that in previous decades the Creek was more polluted than when you were there. Why do you think that was so?
BC: Absolutely, what I was told and what I read was that sewerage was discharged directly into the Creek. That is probably getting more towards Merlynstone and North Coburg and those sort of areas. When we lived in Fawkner there was no sewerage connection, so they had the night soil cart come around. But later on it was connected to the main trunk sewer. There were also meatworks that would discharge their crap into the Creek directly. This is around 80 years ago when I was told the water quality was very bad. It carried diseases and things like that. When the properties started being connected to the main trunk sewer, I believe the water quality improved dramatically. Then later on, when industry started to establish itself along the Creek, pollutants were transported into the Creek through the storm water system.
DS: Could I get on to some of your activities around the Creek with your interest in frogs and lizards. So the lizards and the frogs were the main attraction?
BC: Yes, very much so. That’s what it was all about. When I was young, when I was very young, my brother came home with a bearded dragon, and somehow it imprinted itself on me. I was absolutely fascinated by reptiles and amphibians ever since then. So when I wandered down the Creek, probably the first time I just stumbled across a great big Blue-tongue , I couldn’t believe it. I thought it was something from another world. And we kept going back there and finding more and more of these creatures.
DS: What types of skinks were there?
BC: There were only skinks there as far as reptiles were concerned, we never saw any other family of lizards. The main ones were the Cunningham’s Skinks which live in colonies, there were huge colonies of them of all different aged classes. There were a lot of Eastern Blue-tongues, Golden Water Skinks which were very common around Fawkner. There were massive numbers of them, they were just everywhere. Striped Skinks, skinks I called Grass Skinks, Weasel Skinks, Shortlimbed Skinks. I think at one point I identified nine different species of skinks.
DS: What was the commonest of them?
BC: Definitely the Cunningham’s Skink. And then there would have been the Golden Water Skink. But they were lizards that basked in the sun, so if you went down in the daytime they were out basking.
DS: Can you tell us a bit about the Cunningham’s Skink? Where their burrows were and were they plentiful?
BC: Absolutely, there were uncountable numbers of them.
DS: And how big were they?
BC: They grow to about 45 centimeters. The little ones are spectacular animals, they have a dark appearance with white spots all over them. They have keeled scales, they sun themselves on faces of the basalt, so when you approach them they dive into the crevices and then they inflate their bodies so their scales point the opposite way to how you would force them out. They were pretty well impossible to remove from the crevices. That’s part of the reason why they have been able to hang on for so long. But you could scan the rock faces and you could see dozens of them sunning themselves, and as you approached them they all scuttled back to the crevices. So we would climb over the rock faces, peering into the crevices. I do recall occasionally coming across native bee hives, the little stingless native bees. But when you back off from rocks, and wait, all the skinks would come back again.
DS: Where were the hives?
BC: In the basalt. The hives tended to be on the vertical fissures, while the Cunninghams always lived in the horizontal fissures. They completely dominated those escarpments, I don’t recall any other lizards getting a foothold in there. The Water Skinks lived on the rocks along the Creek, the Blue-tongues would sort of just wander around the place and sun themselves on the rocks along the Creek. Each skink species occupied a different niche. So if we wanted to find Striped Skinks for example, we would go down there and look for rocks embedded in the soil that had the little telltale burrow , and you would lift them up and there would be a big Striped Skink under there. If we wanted to find Blue-tongues, we would just wander round the tussocks, and we’d stumble across them. There were also a lot of Brown Snakes down there at that time too.
DS: Were there other snakes you came across?
BC: There were Brown Snakes, Tiger Snakes and Copperheads, and Red-bellied Black Snakes.
DS: Did you have any close calls?
BC: When I saw a snake I used to charge after it. So it was really the snakes that had to watch out for me. I don’t know why, but it is a reflex when I see a snake I go to it.
DS: An unusual reaction!
BC: There would have been Little Whip Snakes at the time, we would have mistaken them for baby Brown Snakes.
DS: So which was your favorite skink?
BC: Oh, probably the Blue-tongues because they were such an impressive animal. And you could actually pick them up. They would puff themselves up and make a hissing noise, but it was just something for a small child to pick up an enormous Blue-tongue lizard and to be able to hold it.
DS: How big would they be?
BC: Oh, probably shy of two feet, yes, quite large. And they always had this orange belly color.
DS: Do they change color at all according to the environment or the time of the year?
BC: Different locations have different colored morphs, so I would suggest that there was a specific colored morph for the ones along Merri Creek. You do still find the odd Blue-tongue further north, but they are pretty hard to find. I think they are still there though. I know that rats prey on them. So I guess they are struggling .
DS: So there were plenty of the little skinks around?
BC: There were, there were little skinks darting through the tussocks everywhere. If we wanted to, we could go down and collect say fifty small skinks of three or four different species in an hour. We’d go down there with an ice-cream container, fill up an ice-cream container full of skinks.
DS: Did you take them home?
BC: Once or twice, but there was never much value in it. We would sort of collect them and then just tip them out at the end. I do recall taking them home, but then it was like,what do you do with them. So we did have them, but it wasn’t a regular thing. We would pick these things up and look at them, but we probably let them go mostly, because there was no reason to take them home.
DS: I was talking to someone the other day who was observing skinks up in the hills. He said they seemed to be very social animals.
BC: Yeah.
DS: He said he was watching them one day and the little ones were biting each others tails, almost playing.
BC: Yes, the Cunningham’s Skinks very much live in family groups, where you would see…., you would go there and you could see them sunning themselves, and you’d see this year’s live-born young , then you’d see last year’s live-born young slightly larger, and then maybe ones from a couple of seasons ago. And then you’d get the full-grown ones all in the one group living together. I don’t know if they were the one family but in the one crevice for example, you could see maybe between ten and twenty skinks of different sizes. And in another sort of crevice ten meters away, would be another family group of all different sizes, but whether they lived in their own family group or mingled I don’t know. But certainly it appeared to be mum, dad and the kids, with teenagers and that sort of stuff! They were the only lizards that appeared like that. Blue-tongues were always solitary animals. The Water Skinks would live in small groups, but you didn’t really see different age classes together. It was really only the Cunningham’s Skinks that seemed to be tolerant. That’s very much how they are described these days.
DS: What is the greatest threat to the skinks then? What is the situation with them along those grasslands now?
BC: There is still plenty of them around Galada Tamboore, but that is mainly because of the gorge, the basalt gorge, where they are, is completely inaccessible. But the Cunningham’s Skink, I don’t know if you could find them south of Mahoneys Road now. Certainly, at the present time, there are still plenty north of Mahoneys Road. You can go down to the gorge at Galada Tamboore with a pair of binoculars and on the right day count thirty or forty of them. Yes they have managed to hang on, because they are able to protect themselves by wedging themselves in the crevices. The main threat to the Cunningham’s Skink, I would say, would be the local councils which have a habit of pouring soil over the basalt escarpment.
DS: You mentioned earlier that some of the skinks seemed to have disappeared south of Bakers Road. What was that about?
BC: Well, the Water Skink disappeared completely south of Mahoneys Road and they are very hard to find now. I would suggest that is related to the water quality, because they have some relationship with the water, they live in the water. Things like Blue-tongues and the other skinks, I think, fall victim to development, the loss of habitat and habitat modification. I know the Striped Skinks are very sensitive to disturbance. Once their habitat is disturbed, they disappear and you do not see them again. There are still plenty in the Craigieburn Grasslands, but that is a protected reserve. Outside of there, they are hard to find.
DS: So you never came across the Legless Lizard?
BC: No, I never ever saw Delma impar, the Striped Legless Lizard, or the Grassland Earless Dragon. I believe if those creatures did exist in Fawkner or Campbellfield, we would have seen them. We gave the area a very good going over, so I don’t think they were ever there. Because we surely would have found them.
DS: They were reputed to have been there, were they?
BC: There are historical records of them around Craigieburn, which is a little bit further north, but it is essentially the same unbroken landscape. We never ever came across them. So I’m not really convinced they were ever there. That part of the Creek is certainly dominated by skinks, we never saw any dragons there. I know there are Marble Geckos there, but we never saw them when we were little.
DS: They are supposed to be there are they?
BC: Well, I’ve seen them further north, but.. I’ve got them in my house at Northcote now for example..but we never saw them there. I think loss of habitat and habitat destruction probably are the main cause of their decline.
DS: You said some of the escarpment near Jukes Road was knocked over.
BC: Yes, the escarpment on the Reservoir side, one long continuous exposed basalt rock face. But at some point in the early 70’s the Reservoir Council dumped a whole lot of soil on it. It completely buried the whole lot and I always remember at the time being very concerned about all the Cunningham’s Skinks that would have been trapped under the soil. I’ve got a feeling they did it in winter when those lizards would have been inactive and they would have been completely smothered. I always had thoughts of going down there and digging it out, but it was so well covered, I couldn’t quite recollect where those exposed rock faces were. I never really understood why that happened. All I can suggest is that the Council had a lot of soil to get rid of, and that was a convenient spot to dump it. Why they dumped it over the rock faces I do not know. It just seems so senseless.
DS: So if we could move on to your frogs. What were the main frogs?
BC: The main frogs as far as we were concerned were the Growling Grass Frogs which were literally everywhere along the Creek. They are large colorful noisy animals. They like basking in the sun so they were always out, and as you would approach them they would jump from the bank or a rock into the Creek. Then you could see them in the Creek, and when they exposed their rear limbs they had this incredible iridescent purple color. So we would watch them swimming through the water, trying to escape from us , these flashes of purple you could see through the water, it was just amazing. And then they would sort of sit themselves on a rock, we could just see these things sitting there waiting for us to go away( laughs). Absolutely incredible!
DS: Where did they live?
BC: Well they were in the Creek at the time.
DS: In the actual Creek?
BC: In the Creek at the time, but the main place we used to find them was at what I would describe as a permanent spring at the end of Jukes Road, across from McBride Street on the southern side of Jukes Road. Where that spring was is now half covered by the paling fences of the properties that are there now. So we would go down there, half a dozen of us. There was a permanent spring there, and it was actually perched above the surrounding area. And what it was, was exposed basalt, that had sort of cups, or depressions in there that would hold water. Probably at its deepest point it was about a foot deep. There were lots of rushes around there, and this exposed basalt rock . There were sheets of tin , and you would lift up one of these sheets of tin and you would see twenty, thirty, forty enormous Growling Grass Frogs sitting under this sheet. As far as finding somewhere where it was easy to see large numbers of spectacular frogs, that was the place we used to go. That was one of the first places we went to, so that’s definitely around 69/71, where this permanent spring would feed these depressions in the rocks. They were always charged with water, crystal-clear water, all year round. It was an incredible place actually. That was probably, I would say two or three hundred meters west of the Creek at its closest point. We now know from research that the Growling Grass Frog requires in-stream and off-stream habitats. What I observed then very much fits the model that describes their habitat today.
DS: You mentioned earlier there was a marsh at Gowrie Station.
BC: Yes, there was.
DS: Where was that exactly?
BC: If you go there now, if you want to find out exactly where that marsh is, you would go to Gowrie Station , you would walk across the tracks and across that road and there’s a sort of industrial complex. It’s a sort of sprawling factory, on the other side of it is the Merlynstone Creek Retarding Basin. Some of the old Red Gums are still there, but the marshland itself was where the factories are now sitting. That was a fairly large marshland that had clear flowing drainage lines through the middle of it. All around it was full of sedges and rushes, it was always moist underfoot and that was absolutely chock-a-block with frogs. That was where we used to find what I call the Walking Toadlets, now very very rare. Bibron’s Toadlets and the other one, I’ve forgotten its name at the moment. Anyway they are tiny little frogs, about the size of your fingernail, and they don’t hop, they walk. As well as seven or eight other species, including lots of Growling Grass Frogs, Pobblebonks, Spotted Marsh Frogs, Striped Marsh Frogs, Eastern Froglets, Ewing’s Tree Frogs. I can’t remember if the Neobatrachus sudelli (Common Spadefoot Toad) was there.
DS: Were there different habitats for different frogs?
BC: No, that’s a really good question. It appeared there was a suite of frogs species that was common to all of the wet habitats, whether that was the Creek habitat, or the ponds near the Creek, or the marshlands, it seemed to be the same suite of frogs across all the areas. But they were all very common. There was also a small mound near Gowrie Station, it’s now the car park, and it was surrounded by a car park at the time, but it was probably the place that had the highest concentration of skink numbers, small skink numbers, I’ve ever seen. For some reason they were just everywhere. You’d get things like pieces of newspapers that would blow into this place and then if you went in there and lifted up the piece of newspaper, there would be a dozen small skinks under it. That actually persisted for years, later on when I started catching the train to work as an apprentice plumber, I saw that this habitat was still there. And I would wander over to it and still feel the skinks. That little spot persisted till the early eighties.
DS: Do you know what the situation is with most of these frogs today?
BC: I do because I’ve spent most my adult life researching what the hell happened. But the marshlands around Gowrie Station, the drainage line was redirected by Melbourne Water, so it dried the area out. It then became a pretty crappy area, and somebody built a factory on it. The permanent spring at the end of Jukes Road , I stopped going there probably around 72/73 when I started to get other interests. But I never forget. I went back there probably in the late seventies and saw that it had been completely covered with soil, a bit like what happened to the rock faces on the Reservoir side of the Creek. I remember asking one of the people in houses at the end of Jukes Road there what happened. And he said Coburg City Council workers came in there one day and just dumped a whole lot of soil over it , completely buried it. So in fact that place still exists , but it’s under a foot of soil. And I remember going down there one time and digging up the soil , ’cause I was so confused about what happened, and water appeared. So the spring still exists. Well that was twenty years ago . But I believe it is still there buried under the soil, waiting for someone to save it.
DS: So you say the loss of habitat is the main threat to the Growler?
BC: If you asked an academic they would say Chytrid Fungus has killed all of these creatures, but I would say prior to that it was nothing more complex than the destruction of habitat . But that does not account for the frogs in the Creek, because that riparian habitat still exists. But it would probably be the water quality in the Creek. That was the problem. So habitat deterioration then stresses the population, leaves them prone to getting infections like Chytrid Fungus which is now rampant along the Creek. But my own research suggests the Creek may be polluted to a point that hinders the growth of Chytrid Fungus . So there is fine balance going on there . That’s why I believe there are still some Growling Grass Frogs along the Creek, because it is not so polluted they can’t survive there , but it is toxic enough so that the Chytrid Fungus cannot get a proper foothold. Yes, I would like to find out if that’s true or not.
So we were very much focused on all of the lizards, frogs and snakes, but don’t recall seeing many kangaroos, in fact I can’t recall seeing any. There were lots of micro bats. I know ……at night there was a car park at the Jukes Road shops . It would be a sort of spotlight, and we could get small pebbles and throw them up in the air up into the light , and all of these bats would appear out of nowhere into the illumination of the light, jump on these rocks, then realize they weren’t moths and fly away. Yes, we would spend a bit of time there. They would appear out of nowhere. I don’t know what sort of micro bats they were. There were certainly heaps of them at the time.
DS: You mentioned the fish, were they galaxias?
BC: On reflection, I would call them River Galaxias. There were schools of them, yes, swimming up and down. I think there were other kinds of fish, but I can’t quite recall what they were. There were lots of leeches in the Creek, I remember that, because every now and again we would get one of those on our skin. They would sort of swell up enormously and when you pulled them off, blood would pour from where they were attached.
DS: Were they large leeches?
BC: Well, they started off quite small, they’d gorge themselves on our blood, then they’d end up about five or six centimeters, maybe the diameter of a one cent piece or something like that. Hungry little buggers!
DS: Yabbies?
BC: Yes, plenty of Yabbies in the Creek, they were always the little ones. There were certainly lots and lots of Yabbies. Lots of tadpoles. We found … I do recall finding Growling Grass Frog tadpoles in the Creek, around Bakers Road. There were lots around Fawkner, lots of tadpoles around the Gowrie Station marshlands.
DS: Did you catch them?
BC: Yes, of course we would catch them, as children do. We would catch them, take them home and put them in a bottle and watch them swim around. But frogs were very much a dominant feature of the landscape.
DS: What about the quarries. Where were they mainly?
BC: There were three sets of quarries. There were quarries on the west side of Sydney Road, where the Western Ring Road now is. They became landfill, and then the freeway. There was another set of quarries that we used to access through where KMart is now. There was another set of quarries a little bit further north near Bolinda Road which still has Grass Frogs in it. It is currently being protected against a development proposal. We would go down to those quarries and spend the day catching Yabbies . We would take a piece of cotton and couple of bits of chop fat, and we would just throw the cotton with the bit of meat on the end into the water, wait till the line tightened , and pull the Yabbies out. So, in a couple of hours we would fill half a bucket with Yabbies . Big Yabbies, and there a lot of blackberries around at the time too. We could go out there, spend an afternoon out there, and come home with half a bucket of blackberries and half a bucket of Yabbies . We would often gorge ourselves on blackberries and make ourselves sick from it ( laughs). You’d have black fingers and black lips and a sore tummy.
DS: You mentioned earlier the old platypus burrows you found. Where were they?
BC: Now that was at Galada Tamboore. I would describe that as being at the southernmost escarpment of Galada Tamboore. There was a bend in the river, a sort of sweep in the river, and there were burrows going into the exposed side of the Creek bank. It looked like there was a whole bunch of twigs that had been deliberately put there in a sort of crude attempt to make a dam. We never saw the platypus, and it appeared to me the burrows had been abandoned by the time we got there. But still, I would say they had only been abandoned for a couple of years. So that would be in the very early seventies. But we never saw the platypus.
DS: That Yan Yean pipe line, where was it located and where does it go to?
BC: When we used to play down at Barry Road, the pipe was still there, the cast iron pipe was still crossing the Creek. Sometimes we couldn’t cross the Creek so we would climb on to the pipe and work our way across the Creek, sort of straddling the pipe. We were told that it came from Yan Yean, I’m not sure where it ended up, but I was told it worked on a gravity feed delivery so it always had a very slight downhill incline. Over the years the pipe was removed, the concrete supports are still there now. You could follow that pipe on the Thomastown side, and go up through the grasslands, following the pipe. It was like a sort of a pathway. I do recall lots of those stone fences, where people had piled up basalt, there were lots of them. There were a few old abandoned buildings. I do recall concrete slabs, but the walls and roofs had long disappeared, there were plenty of concrete slabs. Just north of Barry Road there were a couple of abandoned buildings, they would have been old farms, old weatherboard farmhouses, sort of pioneers I guess you would call them, and there were a couple of funny old sheds with mattresses in them. I’m not quite sure what was going on in those places, they always had a spooky feel about them. I don’t recall any particular goings-on in those places, but I was always a little bit creeped out by them. We would go there and see these places and be a bit wary of them, and not linger. Just north of Barry Road, maybe less than a kilometer from Barry Road, was a very large swimming hole that my elder brother used to go to a lot, his mates used to ride their bikes up there from Fawkner, and that would have been around the late sixties, and there was a swing rope there. They would spend their days in this pool in the Creek on the swing rope, jumping in the Creek. I did go and try to find that place later, but we couldn’t find it again. I’m not sure if the tree was removed or what happened, we couldn’t see it.
DS: Maybe if we could just move to today. I know you have spent a lot of time working on the Creek, investigating the water quality etc. How do you rate the water quality today?
BC: Toxic.
DS: What are the main pollutants?
BC: Well, from my own monitoring, there is large metal pollution. I’ve been able to record the concentrations of cations in the substrate and water column. They are very high. But I also know that the alkalinity of the Creek keeps them inert. There are very high nutrient loads in the Creek. It’s prone to turbidity when it rains, which stops light penetrating the water column, which has a flow on effect. There’s a lot of algae. When the Creek flows slowly the algae takes over. There are all sorts of nasties in there that I haven’t been able to monitor. It can be things like pesticides, organochlorines. I have been up to have a little bit of a look at what’s in the Creek, but I don’t know the full story. I also know that the Craigieburn Sewerage Treatment Plant’s discharge into the Creek actually helps the water quality , it improves it for a certain section until it loses influence when it deteriorates again. Which is part of the reason why you find Growling Grass Frogs downstream of the discharge point.
DS: How does it improve the quality?
BC: It is described as partial tertiary treated sewerage. And that is actually better quality stuff than is in the Creek. It has this diluting effect, which goes down past O’Herns Road , it sort of loses its effect once you get around Cooper Street. The Yarra Valley Water did try to decommission it, and I was involved in taking them to court to stop that, arguing that it was quite good Growling Grass Frog habitat. I’m not sure what’s going on there now.
DS: Do you think it will ever be possible to overcome the pollution in the Creek to allow your frogs and skinks and so forth to flourish again?
BC: If Melbourne Water would take it seriously, then, yes it’s easy to fix it. The problem is the direct discharge of storm water into the Creek. Because of the way the system is designed , it simply picks up pollutants, concentrates them, and dumps them in the Creek. If Melbourne Water stopped being so stupid, they could think about what they have actually done to the Creek, and start to intercept those drains with settling ponds, which would solve the problem overnight. It is a very simple piece of engineering to sort this out. Why they don’t do it I don’t know. I think they have a lot to answer for, considering all the resources they have. It is really up to them to do something about it. And I wish they would.
DS: Finally Brendan, you obviously have great memories of this area, of your earlier times wandering around with the frogs and the skinks and your mates and so forth. How do you think those earlier experiences have influenced your adult life?
BC: I’ve never been able to let it go. In one way it’s inspiring to see such a fantastic display of nature in our backyard. But in another way it’s very sad our children inherit a lesser world. So my kids certainly can’t go down the Creek and have the same experiences. In fact, if my children said they were going down the Merri Creek, I’d suggest that they do something else, for all sorts of reasons . So I guess the real answer is , it’s sad what we have done to the Creek in our generation, on our watch this has happened. But I guess it has inspired me to try and do something about it , but you can’t help feeling helpless really. Even if I find what might be a problem, it’s quite another thing to do something about it. But really, volunteers from the Friends of Merri Creek are the encouragement to keep trying , clearly not everybody’s given up on it. And I certainly haven’t. But I think, to me, the real issue is that when children of today go down to the places where I used to play , they won’t see all of these creatures, and they think that that is the natural state of affairs, without knowing otherwise. I guess it’s up to us to tell them that what they are looking at is a lesser thing than what we were used to. We don’t have to accept what is now. But I also believe that nature has an inbuilt capacity to restore itself if we allow it to, if we give it the opportunity. So I think the Creek can be salvaged back to what it was, all we have to do is provide the opportunity for the Creek to do so, clean up the water going into the Creek , keep going with the revegetation, remove the weeds, and tell people to lock their cats up, things like that.
DS: Thanks very much for the interview Brendan, really excellent. Thanks for taking part in the Project.
BC: You’re welcome.
Photo: Galada Tambore. Friends of Merri Creek
Link: Fawkner residents lose fight on former Agent Orange’s development
-END-
