What makes your Nillumbik home town/area unique? Who are the characters who have made it so? What sites have significance and why? During 2005 Nillumbik Shire Council and the Literary Reference Group invited members of the community to respond to these questions, to show us the history and flavour of your place – then and now – in a 500 word anecdote. This story, by Gwen Ford, reproduced here with her permission was originally titled: “A Certain Sameness”.
“’Modern society is in such a mess that it needs to destroy every nonconformist to hide the dilemma of its own failure” Alistair Knox writing in “The Green Valley”,1981.
Alistair may well have been thinking of his old friend Matcham Skipper, part of an enthusiastic band in the late forties who understood the local landscape and anticipated its destruction with horror. The group included men and women who all made valuable contributions to the development of Eltham’s cultural and landscape heritage.
A story Matcham tells about the destruction of two landmark oaks in Franklin Street has a familiar ring to it. One Friday after work, having a drink in the local pub, then a tribal meeting place of some character and charm, the group of friends heard a foreign sound, the burring roar of a chain saw. On a large property behind the hotel, two ancient oaks were being cut down by the State Electricity Commission. There were few telephones about then and no way the owner could call for help. Matcham says, our indignation was enormous, we were planting trees around the district after work and on the weekends, and there were these blokes sawing through two beaut old oaks. It sent us wild.
In a great rage, I leapt into my Land Rover, tore back to Montsalvat, sharpened my axe on a grindstone, raced back to Franklin Street, cleared the fence, terrified the old lady who owned the house and cut down two thirty- five foot light poles standing in their holes waiting for wires to be connected. At the time I thought it was the greatest thing I’d ever done. Not meaning to sound boastful but I did cut them clean in half!
All the lovely little winding earth roads were being urbanised as grids of concrete and bitumen. We found it horrifying the way houses were becoming regulated just as we were helping each other to build with mud and secondhand materials. We felt the coming threat to the landscape, of unchecked development and excessive removal of trees.
Destruction
The nearby Bridge Street crossing was being widened to allow for the influx of traffic to the growing industrial area. One weekend, Matcham and friends planted a forest outside a concrete garage. The young trees were immediately demolished by an apprentice at the garage. When challenged, the young bloke was unrepentant. Matcham says, He couldn’t understand what we were on about. He was a teenager, we were in our twenties. He thought we were silly old fools.
On the day of the destruction of the oaks, we all went back up to Montsalvat to make banners. We tore up sheets, painted them, tied them to poles and set them up along the Main Road. We worked all night to secure them. By ten o’clock the next morning they were all gone. We were furious and decided to complain to the police. We marched down to the temporary station, which was then a kind of box room at the back of the York Street Food and Grain Store.
The banners were found stashed at the rear of the shed. I can remember it well. We were young, raging, irate, passionate and utterly convinced that we were in the right.
We banged on the shed door calling out ‘we want our banners back, give us back our banners’. The young constable holding the fort said, ‘I can’t, the boss isn’t here, he’s got an appointment with King Lear’. (King Lear, known to his mother as Keith, was the local hairdresser). People gathered. It was quite something. A reporter arrived with a photographer who took a wonderful picture of the bemused young policeman surrounded by banner wielding, irate protesters which the Argus deemed worthy of a half page the following day!
On his return, the sergeant said ‘oh give em their banners, we don’t want any trouble, sounds as though they’re quite upset’. We hammered them back in immediately.
By the next day, all traces of the SEC pole had completely vanished. Not a woodchip in sight. Apparently, the foreman had travelled interstate for a short holiday with a lady friend. He had instructed the workers to clear up the evidence. He didn’t want any personal publicity.
Today, trees are still being cut down unnecessarily, non conformists remain under suspicion and Nillumbik’s lovers of the natural landscape still fight as passionately for their environment as young idealists did in the late forties.
Footnote:
The trees being planted and destroyed were provided by Matcham’s father Mervyn who ran a plant nursery at Montsalvat during this period.
By Gwen Ford © 2005
