Georgio De Nola – Merri Creek at Reservoir

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 Giorgio De Nola , who lived near the Merri Creek in Anstey Avenue Reservoir in his youth.

The interviewer is Ruth Shiel and the date is 29 September 2012.  The interview takes place in Giorgio’s home in Caroline Springs.

RS:  Could we start by getting some background information?  Where and when were you born?

GDN:  I was born in 1967 in Melbourne.

RS:  Over what period of time did you live on the Merri Creek?

GDN:  From 1967 till 1997.

RS:  Where is the street you lived in in relation to the Creek?

GDN:  I lived in Anstey Avenue which is two streets off the Merri Creek, near Moomba Park and not far from Pipeworks.

RS:  And how built up was that area when you lived there?

GDN:  When I lived there, there were probably three or four streets with houses in them, Anstey Avenue, Churchill Avenue , Mahoneys Road.  While I was a teenager, Moira Avenue and Lockton Avenue were starting to get built as well.  We were quite disconnected from the rest of Reservoir and also from Fawkner.  I think it was Hughes Parade and Davidson Street that weren’t complete.  So it was just a little pocket of Reservoir which had no connection to anywhere else actually.  So the Creek was actually quite important.

RS:  What were the occupations of the people who lived in the area?

GDN:  Oh, it was mainly blue collar, working class area when I was growing up.

RS:  Were there farms or market gardens left?

GDN:  No, I think they were all gone by the time I got there.  I remember as a really young kid there was a donkey cart in the area.  There was one donkey that died on the road, I remember.  We only had one bridge, it must have been about 76 or 77, because I was going to school when the school bus was held up for hours because there was a dead donkey on the road.  But I think most of that was gone before I got there.

RS:  And you said you went to Fawkner Tech.  Was the Hamersley Court bridge built then?  How did you get to school?

GDN:  No, that bridge came a lot later. There were two ways across the Creek.  There were a number of ways to cross the Creek, but mainly you either went to Mahoneys Road and used the single bridge that was there, the north bridge, the short way, or there were crossing areas where there were rocks in the Creek.  We would cross that way.  Some of the guys built little wooden bridges and the like.  But every time there was a really big wet, they were washed away.

RS:  What was the area like between your home and the school ? Was it fairly open?

GDN:  Yes, it was.  The Creek back in the 1970s and 1980s, nobody had done any work on it at that stage.  So there was barely a tree around, and if there was one, it was a willow, lots of box thorn, some grasslands, but I didn’t recognize them as grasslands then when I was a kid.  The school path was down Janice Court.  I would go down Churchill Avenue and Mountbatten Court and down to the Creek that way.  There was a rock crossing there and then when you crossed the Creek into Moomba Park there was a large rise and it was very open, large paddocks, we would walk through those and make our way to Anderson Road that way via Somerlayton Crescent.  So that was the normal route we took, otherwise if we went down Mahoneys Road  and came down through Birchwood Street, the end of Birchwood Street was just paddocks back then, you just had to dodge the bull that was in one of the paddocks there. That was the other way we would go.

In the 70s and 80s, I was going to primary school in Moomba Park, so I used to walk that way, and spend my bus money on food  and other things.  For primary school, I would normally go the Mountbatten Court way, and secondary I went the other way, Birchwood.

RS:   There are reserves there now, like the B.T. Connor Reserve.  Was that there, or any other reserves?

GDN:  The B.T. Connor, as long as I can remember, it was there, but it was up a part of the Creek that I didn’t go to till later, when I was a bit older.  The B.T. Connor, that was where the soccer ground was, yeah?  That is where Preston-Macedonia played.  I think that’s been there for a while.  There used to be a reserve on the Fawkner side of the Creek at Jukes Road, there used to be a football ground, I remember that, I think it is a nursing home now.

RS:  So what sort of vegetation was around?

GDN:  Oh look, back then it was very open, on the Creek side, all the vegetation was basically gone. There were the willows, as I mentioned, it was very sparse, what looked like weeds then, but I had really no idea.  There was lots of fennel down there, and lots of Italians and Greeks used to collect the fennel

RS:  So now there are eucalypts, wattles, callistemons, she-oaks, but none were there then?

GDN:  No, that came from big planting programs that were happening in the 80s.  Before that, it was very bare and open.  So what I saw in the 1980s and what I see now, is a very different Merri Creek.  Back then, the decorations were cars rather than trees, I guess.

RS:  Did the adults of the area have anything much to do with the Creek?

GDN:  No, the only adults you saw in the area were police chasing motor cyclists and the like. Motor cyclists used to use the area a lot, particularly before the Broadmeadows bicycle track went in.  There used to be a tip just west of Pipeworks, and when that shut, they turned it into a motor cycle track.  Before that, there were always motor cyclists riding along the Creek down there.

I can’t remember which summer it was, it would have been the late 70s, they lost two motor cyclists on that Creek, that’s what I remember, having accidents.

RS:  When you were a lad, what did you do around the Creek?

GDN:  How much time have we got?  We spent our life down the Creek.  Some of the more vivid things would be finding places where we made our cubby houses, we would go out and do things like camping or parasailing, or what we called parasailing.  What looked like huge cliffs back then, were only about two or three meters high, we would be throwing ropes up, pretending we were climbing over it and doing silly things like that.  Huge areas of box thorn, we would cut out tunnels and an opening in the middle that were like super cubby houses.  We would catch  yabbies,  couple of guys liked to get down there yabbying.  All sorts of mischief.  I have a scar on my hand from grabbing some corrugated iron, I was sliding down the hill on some corrugated iron, stuff like that.  Riding bikes along the paths, always down there on a bike as well.

RS:  What about fishing?

GDN:  People did fish, I never fished.  You did see some guys fishing down there.  Mainly eeling, lots of yabbying, particularly young kids liked to yabby.  I’d be down there looking for frogs and lizards quite often.  I do remember a big fish kill right near Pipeworks, about 1980.  Just dozens of fish floating in the water, just north of the north bridge on Mahoneys Road.

RS:  One of the people we have interviewed said that there were Australian Blackfish in the Creek when he was young.

GDN:  I couldn’t tell you, I have no idea.  I’m guessing, they were probably about 30 centimeters long.  I don’t know what a blackfish looks like, but the fish I saw were not black, sort of a silvery round-mouthed fish.  I really couldn’t tell you what it was.

RS:  How far down the Creek would you have walked?

GDN:  As I got older and the bridges got better, we could regularly go the Coburg Lake, which was probably about once a month.  In my twenties, my mother and I would regularly do that walk.  Three or four times a week , we would walk at least to Connor Reserve along the Fawkner side of the Merri, and come up through Cooper Street, do a sort of a loop , through the grasslands there.  But sometimes we would go all the way up to Coburg Lake.  When I was younger, I never really got up to Galada Tamboore.  But I do remember quite often going up through Central Creek, following Central Creek until you get to what I remember as a drainage channel.  On the map here it looks like the one that runs behind Victoria Street and Carrington Boulevard, but when I was a kid, there was nothing there.  And particularly after a big rain, we used to walk up along that channel , and we might fish 100 to 200 tennis balls out of that channel.  That was something we did quite a bit of.  Of course that is well before the present streets were done.

RS:  What were the paths like along the Creek?

GDN:  Oh we didn’t have a path, it was really just well worn tracks.  Nothing like you have got today.  You got soaking wet after rains because you were walking through long grass quite often, and just a thin path.

RS:  Was there a group of you that played around the Creek?

GDN:  It just depended on the activities, you know.  Me and my neighbor did spend a lot of time doing things on our own .  But at other times there were big groups of us down there doing stuff, maybe half a dozen to a dozen kids running around down there.  No one bugged us down there.

RS:  You mentioned Central Creek. Was it the same sort of vegetation as on the Merri ?

GDN:  No, Central Creek was different.  The vegetation along the Merri Creek, it wasn’t anything you would recognize as a grassland, maybe only in patches.  It was mainly weeds, more thistles, artichokes and that sort of stuff.  Central Creek was very different.  Now it’s a bit odd, I go there today and see kangaroos , but when I was a kid the only things you saw down the Creek were reptiles, no macropods or anything.  But today you go there, you see kangaroos in Central Creek.  I’m not sure why , whether they have come back, but I don’t think they were ever there.  I’m not sure why they are there now, but they are.

RS:  You mentioned you used to cut down the boxthorn.  Why was that?

GDN:  There was no environmental consideration.  It was quite thorny and we would cut our tunnels through, we were making cubby houses out of it, and we would be camping in the middle of it.  You’d cut out the centre of it and you would just burn what you cut out, and you had your cubby house.  That’s what it was for.

RS:  Was there a bridge over the Creek at Broadhurst Avenue then?

GDN:  I can’t remember when that went in, but there were certainly no bridges along the Creek in the late 70s, but maybe late 80s we started to see them, or in the 90s.  But certainly there was nothing back then.  It was all rocks, you just crossed where the rocks were.  I really can’t remember when those crossings went in . Now I do remember playing under 14s cricket in 1981, I do remember crossing that swollen Creek, and there was no bridge then.  So it was after 1981 that those bridges started to go in.

RS:  In the Merri itself, what was the water quality like?

GDN:  I do remember a clear Creek, but I don’t remember a lot about it.  Up near Pipeworks you might see foam and stuff, but it was really hard to judge.  You never saw much unless there was a big rain, it was almost always relatively clear.  That does not necessarily mean that the water quality was good.  You wouldn’t have tried to drink it.

RS:  Did the Creek have steep banks in this area?

GDN:  Yeah, they were, depends where you are talking about.  In the main, where the Creek is, you have probably a two meter drop or something like that, and then off that you have another large drop that could be 10 to 15 meters.  So when we used to come down Mountbatten Court, that Court goes down a fair way as you come off the basalt down into the Creek through an empty house block that was there at the time.  We used to get down the Creek that way, so that was a sort of a steady drop down into the Creek.  Then once you got to the Creek, there was probably a two meter drop into the Creek.  Then you would cross the Creek and come up, it was actually quite steep to get up on the Moomba Park side.  It was at least 10 meters if not higher, we used to stand at the bottom of it and contemplate trying to get up the thing.  And then we ran up it.  The other way was, you could have walked, when you crossed the Creek at Mountbatten, a few hundred meters around to the west and then come back up.  This was easier to get up.

RS:  Did the Creek have some deep holes?

GDN:  None that we swam in.  No one really swam in the Creek down there.  Some people put bathtubs in and floated down the Creek, that’s what kids do.  We used to go elsewhere if we wanted a swim, either Bulla or Warrandyte, we would drive there of course.

RS:  Were there any frogs there?

GDN:  Oh yes, definitely.  We used to catch heaps.  My favorite frog spot was actually in Churchhill Avenue, just east of Sheargold Court on the north side of the road.  Below the third or fourth house along, a big double story place , you started to come off the basalt plain there, it was getting lower there, there was a big hole there and it was always full of water.  I used to go frogging in there.  But, you know, where there’s water, there’s frogs.  That was just off the Creek. Down the Creek we used to catch skinks, a couple of stumpy tails I’ve caught, some blue tongues and that sort of stuff.

RS:  What about snakes?

GDN:  The only two I knew of were the tigers and the browns.  Every summer there would be dead snakes in Churchill Avenue down near the shop, they were always there. I had friends who were avid snake catchers, one lived in Joan Court and the other in Moira Avenue.  Sometimes they would take me down looking for snakes, because they knew exactly where the snakes lived, and they showed me all their haunts. We would go down looking, but not a lot of times, snakes and me weren’t very good friends.

RS:  What was their interest in the snakes?

GDN:  They had snakes at home that they had taken out of the Creek.  They weren’t the type that would kill them, but there were those who if they came across a snake would kill it, particularly in those days, and particularly if there was one out in the street, he wan’t going to last long.

RS:  Do you remember any main floods that came down?

GDN:  It’s a pretty steep cutting there, where I am talking about.  The Creek was often flooded so you couldn’t cross and you had to walk up to Mahoneys Road to get across.  It didn’t need a lot of rain and the Merri Creek can get quite high.

RS:  There are a a number of large stones east of the Hamersley Road bridge.  Do you know anything about them? They seem to have a motif carved on them.

GDN:  I am not sure, but it is certainly a very rocky area.  There are areas where the stones are quite huge, but I am not sure what you are referring to , but there are some down in the Creek more than up on the bank.

RS:  No, these were quite up from the Creek.  They look as if they have actually been placed there.  Was the Creek ever straightened out there?

GDN:  I’ve never seen the Creek change, no.  So if it happened , it happened before I got there.  You have to remember it’s a really deep cutting here, so houses don’t get flooded in this area, because they are well above the Creek.  Probably 15 or 20 meters above the Creek they are. You need a huge rain event to get up there.

RS:  You mentioned some pollution from Pipeworks.  What sort of pollution generally was in the Creek?

GDN:  I just do recall foam.  Sometimes you would see foam in Central Creek as well.  I don’t from where it came.  I had no idea what it was at the time.

RS:  Were there any industries in the area?

GDN:  Boral Bricks were always there, but they were on the north side of Mahoneys Road.  Then you had Tip Top Bakeries which were here in Trawalla Avenue as well.  There was Pantalica Cheese, there was Bertocchi, the meat place.  On Saturday morning we might visit all those with mum.  Sometimes we would ride our bikes down there.  And across the road there were all sorts of factories there.

RS:  Did much pollution come from them do you know?

GDN:  It would be hard to believe that Boral Bricks weren’t releasing anything into Central Creek.  They would almost certainly have had to have been.  And don’t forget you had the tip just off Merri Creek.  Certainly that would be contributing to the pollution, as the ground water from the tip would seep into the Creek which was quite deep there.

RS:  A couple of people we have interviewed had stories about notable characters in their area.  Do you remember any local characters?

GDN:  Most of the kids were characters!  We got up to lots of mischief.  As far as adults are concerned, gee we got left to our own devices back then.  The only ones who were eccentric were those who didn’t want you in their back yard, getting a ball.  There weren’t any outwardly eccentric people that I recall.  But there were those who didn’t like any extra attention, so to speak.

RS:  Finally, what was life like for you as a kid around the Merri in earlier times?

GDN:  Oh, it was fantastic living along the Creek.  I spent a huge amount of time down there.  You’ve got to remember that I played a lot of football and cricket at Moomba Park, so I was always using the Creek to get there , and always using it to get home.  It was fantastic.  I think it’s a lifestyle that the kids miss today.  We live on the Kororiot Creek now , but the kids barely spend any time down there.  But as a kid being able to do that was fantastic.

RS:  Do you think that living on the Merri as a kid had any effect on how your life developed as an adult?

GDN:  Almost certainly.  I was in organized sports , but I was always doing something down there as well.  But even the time I spent down there with my mates kept us all out of trouble, rather than in the streets.  I am sure it did.

RS:  Anything else you would like to mention about the Creek?

GDN:  Just that last point that we made.  In some respects I think the Creek is more useable today when you look at it , and the work that has been done is fantastic .  It probably took 15 to 20 years to get it to look at least half inviting for adults to get there and use it .  But back in my day the kids would use it , I don’t think they’re using it today , and I think it’s a real shame.  But that’s just the way it is .

RS:  Thank you very much Giorgio for your participation.

Image: Moomba Rocks