a few days ago in altona

Last Wednesday Perry and I went to the Altona Coastal Park, as recently mentioned. I recommend it. 

I was really, really confused about what this big building was on the horizon. 

So this is a remnant, apparently, of the Williamstown Racecourse which burned down in the 1940s. I don't know why the ruins remain 80 years later. Seems silly. Actually (see below) it will be exactly 80 years in about three months. We should have a party. I hate racing. 

Melbourne Argus 30 January 1947 p. 1

I actually found it quite difficult to place where the buildings were. The clipping above makes the whole complex seem pretty grand. 

We went as far as the sea but we didn't go in. 

It was a strangely cool morning, and the city was partially in fog. 

altona coastal park yesterday

Fact is, we started a walk in Altona Coastal Park yesterday but decided it was too hot already, it wasn't even 9:30. Saw some more nice birds there, if the birds get exponentially nicer the further you go into the park, mate, you're laughing. 

Going to come back really soon and become one of those man-walking-dog/man-being-dragged-by-dog icons. 

mobiltown

I don't know if I ever showed you this picture I took about 50 years ago of Mobiltown station. I remember going there to see it because it was in the Gregory's (street directory) and I was just intrigued. I have mentioned this to you previously but I don't think you have seen the picture. So, what this tells me, piecing it together like Guy Pearce in Memento, is that I was the kind of kid who was entirely happy to wander out into the world on my own and take trains to obscure industrial parts of Melbourne, and I had film in the camera and I got there and I was like, 'I have to record this place, no-one will ever believe me otherwise', and did so, and kept the photograph, loose, for almost half a century. I found it a few days ago and I don't know that there's really any point in keeping it for anything, although I might consider putting it on Wikipedia. 

Although there is one thing I do legitimately remember. As I told you in 2010, I really did get surrounded by bikies on the station platform, or rather, they rode their bikes around me but they didn't stop or say anything to me. I guess they were riding in a group down Kororoit Creek Road and they saw a kid on the station platform and decided amongst themselves but wordlessly to terrorise him a bit so it was just kind of, mildly threatening behaviour but I guess they didn't know where to take it. Then they left, and after a while a train came, I got on it and went back to the city and then I suppose I went home. 

It was a nothing station. It didn't have any buildings on it or anything. It was just, as you see, an asphalt platform (on the left you can see one fuel storage structure, I don't know what they're called). It's weird that the train even stopped there every time. I have tended to assume, there being no date on the photograph, that it was 1978 that I went there, but I can't be certain about that. That date is just arrived at through knowing that 12 (1977) is too young for me to be travelling around by myself and by 14 (1979) I just wasn't so into this kind of foray. The Wikipedia entry I linked to above mentions that VicRail or whomsoever was responsible for this, had expressed its intention to close the station down in 1977, which I don't remember being aware of when I went there but it's possible. If there had been an announcement in the newspaper, I probably would have seen it. As far as I can tell, there was really only one mention of Mobiltown in any article in the Age in the 1970s, and it was a non sequitur in this article about people who'd been relocated from Darwin to the Wiltona hostel after Cyclone Tracey: 

The article is by John Larkin and without any further information I can only assume that this 'Mobiltown?' is a call for common sense along the lines of 'There's a Mobiltown!? Wtf is Mobiltown?'* 

My sense is not that I went there because I thought 'I have to record Mobiltown station quickly because they're about to close it!' more like, 'I have to experience what on earth exists at Mobiltown station because my imagination just doesn't stretch to comprehending what on earth could possibly be there.' 

I note that the photograph has a weird, I'm going to call it a stain, on it, that looks a little bit like a sack tied with a drawstring. Pretty sure that is something on the surface of the print, not part of the image captured by the camera. I cannot imagine what might have made that stain but I guess it could be any one of a massive range of things, as I said, this photograph has been floating around, loose, in my stuff, for many decades. It's extraordinary it still exists, espectially considering what doesn't, anymore. There are a few surface abrasions on it. Down the bottom right hand corner, there is a bit of glare from me taking a photograph of the photograph with my phone a few days ago. 

If I took more than one photograph, I don't seem to have any others anywhere, but then I would have said I didn't have any at all before I came across this one. 

*John Larkin, '"Little Darwin" of the south' Melbourne Age 12 February 1975 p. 9

meander - 3

 Perry having sensory experiences at Cherry Lake, Altona Beach, Helping Hands Sunshine. 

cherry lake

I am not kidding, as a child I was obsessed by Cherry Lake, also known as Lake Cherry. I used to look at it in the Gregorys and wonder wtf it could possibly be. I couldn't imagine what it could even slightly look like. It became one of those things, I don't know if you have things like that, but it was a place of great mystery that kind of entered into a particular plane of consciousness whereby I could hardly deal with it. Well today, without any particular forethought, I dealt with it. I went there. I was there. 

It was honestly an accident. Perry and I went to look at the Stony Creek backwash and having done that, coming out of the little cul-de-sac where I'd parked, I realised I didn't have a chance of turning right and going back towards the city so I turned left assuming at some point I'd be able to make a more convenient or practical turn. Then eventually I was just heading towards Williamstown and a worm in my head said go to Cherry Lake. It wasn't hard. 

Here is Perry examining not a cherry but an apple in Cherry Lake. It was presumably put there for flavouring. 

Here he is contemplating existence and ducks.

Oddly enough a lot of the path around the lake is placed in such a way you can't see it a lot of the time, so great is the distance, and the foliage. 

So, for instance, this is looking out across to the lake but where is it, ya know? 

Presumably this very overgrown and fenced-off path was once a path to the lake, but I wouldn't fancy your chances now. 

This is where something called Cherry Creek enters Cherry Lake. Whatever Cherry Creek has in it, the ducks love it. 

You can see them in the middle distance there. 

Picture where the oil refineries and the city skyline blend across the lake, #1. 

Picture where the oil refineries and the city skyline blend across the lake, #2 (with swans).

So that's Cherry Lake. I now have no more mysteries, at all, in my life. At all. 

Cherry Lake reentered my consciousness incidentally a few months ago when some paper ran a story on the actor Pia Miranda, who apparently walks its perimeter every day I think. I spent a lot of time there trying to remember her last name, my brain throwing up various other Pias, not that there are millions, but Pia Zadora obviously etc. I have since realised where I was going terribly wrong - for some reason I got it into my head that Pia Miranda was Pino Amenta's daughter, but I couldn't really remember his name either, and if I was sailing towards that notion, well, her name is obviously not Pia Amenta. It took a fucking long time to piece it together. Pino Amenta's actor daughter's name is Jade. Pia Miranda has nothing to do with the Amentas at all. Sorry to all concerned. I could have cleared it up with two minutes of wikipedia wandering but I was lazy. 

Oh, and here it is from not the 1975 Gregorys but the 1966 Melways when it was still known as a swamp. There was a lot more swamp around it then too seemingly. I MISS THOSE DAYS

perry at the beach last week

Perry really loves water, and if it's fresh water he'll drink it, and if it's sea water he'll just paddle in it. He has never swum as far as I know but I think all dogs can? I'd be happy for him to have a go given the right conditions.

This was him at Altona Dog Beach on 23/12 just as the sun was going down. The tide was super far out and there was almost no-one there. Perry did bark a lot at a curious Alsatian but otherwise he was pretty well behaved. 

generaltona

I notice from today's Melbourne Magazine Julia Gillard espousing the values of Generaltona. She's right, it's a great place. I particularly like the main drag, there is additionally a top icecream shop on the next block east, corner Bent and Esplanade I suppose. Once a few years ago for some reason I was there with Andrew Withycombe and someone he worked with appeared, it was strange, we weren't used to seeing Andrew with people he worked with. He didn't radically alter his personality or anything.

I used to think Altona marvellous when I was a child and viewed it in the Gregory's but never went there. Still to this day I have not seen Cherry Lake, even from a distance.

I will leave the posting below intact but I now realise looking at this map (purloined from Ausway) that my ancient Usualtona contact was in fact not living across from the railway reserve. All wrong. Bad memory and I didn't check the Melways.

It's funny, isn't it, that as a child I really adored the Gregory's, used to spend hours leafing through it, but now I am fully devoted to the Melways.

In 1927. C. D. Gardner, a carpenter from Altona, wrote to the Melbourne Metropolitan Town Planning Commission with a scheme of his own devising. Gardner envisaged the building of a canal network, an ‘Artificial Yarra’ through his own locale, north to Keilor:

Open a canal in a suitable place on the foreshore of land (low lying) about Altona and Continue same for shipping conveniences, to Industrial or Factory sites along its Banks. make an Artificial Yarra through flat and almost see level country acrross Keilor plains if necessary cross section of canals to make the Industrial Area compact. I hardly think any optimism on my part will outway any levelheaded and practical conclusion of your Committee, but I would like to say here. (Survey this idea from a National and economic Point) + I beleive it will outway any financial difficulties…

Gardner signed off ‘yours faithfully for Australia’ then reconsidered and continued with a ‘visionery pen picture’ which he set in 1960:

Worlds ships entering this canal passing Docks capable of Repairing the best and biggest of them. Swiftly + directly moving to their destination for the unloading of their Cargo’s… in deliveries to suit their respective Customers. Passing factory and foundry smokeless and clean. the objectionable smoke being converted in gas or power utility… Crews of British and foreign vessells mingling + working with our Pure White Stock of Mankind’s Brotherhood, whom are working under compulsory, co-operative or peice work standards conditions.

(Prescient or what!)