glenroy/broady

Had to go to Broady yesterday for reasons I am not yet ready to share, and went on the train, so took some paths not so travelled lately, it was sort of interesting. 

A couple of benches. The top one is, I suspect, a local handiperson's handiwork, and it's nicely done. The next is I imagine a council construction that some clever clogs has seen fit to burn, presumably on purpose. I mean these are never used, were never used before one of them was made unusable, as far as I know. 

I often have the experience of knowing something's gone but not knowing what it was, so this patch of grass intrigued me not a little because I was very certain that there was once a building of some sort here, but what the hell could it have been? Apart from anything else, clearly (not in the pictures, but in real life) access was very limited. Anyway, here I present my picture of an empty space. 

a more innocent time

Episode #28, 'Eye Witness'. Just letting you know that this rather convoluted story mainly set in Hurstbridge includes an Aboriginal character, unnamed - a 'black tracker' who is helping the police track down a soldier who has killed his wife - at some point there's a conversation about contacting the Broadmeadows (!) police station to find one. Here he is:

The dead woman's daughter is sent out by her grandmother to get help when they are bailed up by the gunman. He shoots at her but by good luck she comes across the police and the 'black tracker'. He doesn't get involved in the tough stuff, just holds her close while the police disarm the gunman. 

But guess who plays him? Yeah, I don't know either, as he is not listed in the credits. I'd almost go so far as to say he's noticeably absent from the credits since they're usually three-to-a-screen, and in this case, they're very obviously light-on. The only (not at all acceptable) reason for not putting his name in the credits is that he doesn't have a speaking role - and he doesn't, because even though the character speaks, the words are clearly overdubbed. TBF most of the filmed sections in the show are overdubbed, if there's any dialogue at all, which there usually isn't. Oh and by the way I like Leonard Teale, but... 

If you were a child hiding under a house and this appeared before you, would you feel reassured? Only if you really loved Luna Park.

community

I've wondered this before, and I probably won't do it because names take on a life of their own. but since my move to City Gardens there is more of a case than ever before for me changing the title of this blog. I haven't lived in Lorraine Crescent since 2013, I mean that's close to ten years. We finally did the property settlement a few months ago and the house is now Mia's. I really enjoyed my early years in that house as is probably evident from what I wrote back then (and from the fact that I named the blog after it). I still feel a considerable connection to the area, it's the first place I really felt vested in as an adult. So it's oddly still a bit of a wrench. I don't know if I can have the same kind of feeling for North Melbourne as I did for Jacana/Broadmeadows, I think NM is a bit too big and harsh and complicated. That said I was out with the grabber yesterday and a woman with a fluffy dog in a pram asked me where I got the grabber from, and for a second I felt like well this is kind of a community-styled conversation. 

big day out

 

My story begins at the Broadmeadows Shopping Centre though of course like all stories there is a preface of I guess not only millions of years of life on Earth but also God's infinite existence, but let's start where my story begins, at the Broadmeadows Shopping Centre. Faffing around like an old fool at JB trying to get the cheapest easiest earbuds (ugh I hate that term) for my phone, which means actually buying an adaptor and then getting cheap 'n' nasty old-school product. I didn't want bluetooth nothing (yes I do have bluetooth things somewhere, but where are they? Answer me that and then we don't have to have a terse exchange). I knew I would be doing a fair bit of walking today and I wanted to listen to podcasts or whatever. (I say whatever, but all I ended up listening to was podcasts.) So here I am wandering through the BSC after buying something for that purpose, also, some dog biscuits. I had about 25c in 5c pieces jangling away in my pocket for the guide dog dog into whose head you put money. It's good luck I know 25c isn't much but it adds up if you do it every time for fear of having bad luck. Next slide please.

This is the argument I was having at the same time. I always try to have an argument with some drone from Optus every day, it keeps them on their toes and keeps my bile up. 

I took Barry and Ferdie out for a little walk, and as is now my wont I let them go into the water. It was quite a warm day (it got warmer, this is only midday) but Barry did not want to go into the water, just potter around the edge. They were panting quickly though and they both drank deep from their water bowl when they got back. 

I decided after this to walk to Glenroy which means first of all crossing Jacana Reserve (this picture is a bit of an illusion, there's a big drop between the green grass and the yellowed bit which is much further away, I saw that and can't unsee it but I am not sure how it looks to you, just imagine the second tree from the right is absolutely on the edge of a steep hill, and when I say imagine, it's not a lie. 

Emu Parade shops, a late 1950s Housing Commission construction which has never really been a jumpin' joint in my experience, though someone there was smart enough to register the name Broady Pizza and that was, well, smart. Hard to conceive of this now but whereas Jacana is the very southernmost tip of the City of Hume today and for many Hume is really two major centres - Sunbury and Broadmeadows - the old Broadmeadows council went much further south. It unnecessarily irritates me that the true fact is often stated that, until Hume set up the Broadmeadows library there was no library at Broadmeadows. And there wasn't! But Broadmeadows CC ran at least two libraries - at Fawkner and Glenroy - because Broadmeadows wasn't really where the population was. OK enough defending Broadmeadows CC for now. Don't really know what this landscaping etc is about (in the top picture) but seriously, that vacant land on the right which I think was once a petrol station (never in my Jacana experience, so more than 15 years) has been vacant too long. It should be a groovy vegan cafe and record shop, shouldn't it. 

So many great brick HCV houses in Jacana, it was probably one of the last bastions of brick HCV before they went concrete (as they did over the railway line within years). This one has a name, 'Jallen'. 

This is not a house but a tree with a really nice view. I have probably mentioned this before, I don't know what happened here, it was a weatherboard house probably from the 1920s that burned down about a decade ago. Surely foul play of some sort. I met a man there, when the house was still standing, who claimed to be the owner, he told me that there was an old saying in Greek that you needed three things in life, friends, cunt and money, which was not as far as I'm concerned the sort of thing you say to a stranger, probably not even a friend, and certainly not the kind of thing you write on a blog for anyone to see. He was complaining that he was not being enabled by council to pull down the house and build something else on it, and now the house is not there, but I don't see anyone trying to build anything on it, so what's that about? 

As you probably know when the Bolte government considered ways to get people to and from the new Tullamarine Jetport, dedicated 1959, a significant amount of land was reserved from the Broadmeadows line just south of Jacana station (which actually opened that year) to the airport. Presumably most of it was sold yonks ago, but this little patch was only developed a few years ago and currently looks like this. It is called something ridiculous like Coupling Lane which sounds a bit, hmm, not heteronormative but at least relationshiponormative. It should have been called Friends, Cunt and Money Avenue. Why? Well, it has a tree in it, that makes it an avenue. Avenue been told that's what makes an avenue? 

So I crossed the railway line. This is in the yard of the house in Glenroy where these people live: 

Glenroy has a lot of good weatherboard houses like for instance this one:

I know what you're going to say but I kind of like the idea of these flats, too, in Pascoe Vale Road:

Then I went to the two Glenroy op shops. I hope never to see this film. I only photographed it in case I was ever challenged at a dinner party to provide an example to counter the claim that 'everyone who ever wrote the text on the front of a DVD never made a mistake in punctuation'. 

I didn't buy this either though I probably should have. 

What the hell was being implied by the shapes formed by the song titles? Also, who is more objectified by this, the woman or the mop? Assuming neither of them is actually Ken Griffin. OK, next slide please. 

Look I now can't remember what this cafe used to be called, I have remarked about it en blog in temps passe and it will probably come to me. But calling it "21 Days Later" seems zany, I mean why not just go the whole hog and name it after a real dystopian horror film? 'Meet you at Night of the Living Dead!' I didn't go in, it looked a little sad in there but I think that's covid trading, not any reflection on the current owners. 

Glenroy underpass, which everyone loves. I suspect its days are numbered however as there is presently a skyrail solution to the very real shithouseness of the Glenroy level crossing. What worries me more is what this means for... 

The Rotary Centre, a pretty decent op shop for a long time now, is no longer trading. I have a sense that this building is actually pretty old, though I concede it doesn't necessarily look it. I have a feeling it hasn't got long. I wish I could remember something I got there when it was an op shop that sparked joy but to be honest, nah. It had a certain something though. 

Behind you! 

So we shall see where this ends up. Meanwhile, over the road from this sign/site, the weird phenomenon of the other big Glenroy supermarket that was a kind of bizarro world 'how does it make money' place, presently I suspect fixing to die (it's certainly not trading any more):

Kept walking down towards Oak Park, stopping in at the beach for a relax. 

Travelled all the way to Kensington on the train, during which time I heard from a lovely girl who just wants to be friends: 

Apparently she lives in Bendigo now but she was originally from Narrogin in WA, which is about an hour's drive north of Katanning, where I have been, but I don't think I've been to Narrogin. I wonder why she wants to be my friend and what she has just for me. Sadly I have too many friends so I had to decline. 

I wish this story had a good solid ending, maybe you're just happy it has any kind of ending whatever it is. I went to Cheaper Buy Miles and KFL Kensington (no relation at all, as far as I'm aware, to KFL Glenroy) and then I got the tram back because my feet hurt and my shopping bag was heavy. Curiously, just as I got back to Parkville I saw an instagram post from the national archives showing the cast of Aunty Jack, which I recently found out something interesting about (and put on the Aunty Jack wikipedia page). Did you know that the first Aunty Jack outing on Australian (naturally) TV was on the same night that Monty Python was first shown on Australian TV? Well, anyway... 

That's not a good ending to my story of my day out, but it'll have to do you. 

car wash yesterday

 

It was as usual a great car wash experience although there was a big recent bird shit on the bonnet which didn't really come off or indeed at all, but at least I got all the tree seeds off. I hope they are carried away through the drains and plant themselves somewhere, I don't wish them ill, just want them off my car. Which by the way is driving like a dream now but I am still a bit nervous since the brakes failed. 

one day soon I'm going to get a pot of black paint and finish this mural by giving all the characters sarcastic eye expressions

 

down near jacana station

But on the eastern side of the line.

i wonder what brian mannix thinks

(This is another potential newspaper piece from a year or so ago that I couldn't figure out a proper ending for and never submitted anywhere. You know how it is. So that's why Mia only gets referred to as 'my wife' etc.)

It’s late for a weeknight, and I’m trying to get back home to Broadmeadows from Northcote in what looks like a straightforward fashion – tram towards Bundoora and then a Smart Bus via Keon Park. It being the 21^st century, I figure I could do worse than check when the next Smart Bus is coming, so I call metlink. I want, I tell a man, to get a bus to Airport West. He retreats behind muzak and announcements for five minutes and then returns. ‘You want to go to Melbourne Airport?’

Melbourne has a rich and extraordinary history, and its nomenclature is a big part of that. Settlers and public servants and developers and others have all played a part in attaching names to places – be it a place name (or random word) from an indigenous language, the name of an old homestead, an evocation of someone’s birthplace in Britain, or a prominent politician. All of these are legitimate to varying degrees.

Where problems arise are in similarities. Ten years ago my wife and I lived in Mincha Street, West Brunswick. Manica Street is two blocks away; both streets run north from Brunswick Road near the turn off to the Tulla. The number of times that people – taxi drivers, party goers, other general visitors – came to our door hoping it was 6 Manica Street became ridiculous (and that doesn’t include the number of times we got 6 Manica Street’s mail). Presumably 6 Manica got our mail and visitors too. What was perhaps strangest was the disbelief – even disgust and dismay – directed our way by others’ mistakes.

Those two streets have been two blocks apart for a hundred and twenty years, and surely hundreds of thousands of visitors have been confused by the similarity for more than a century. It’s only a couple of minutes to go from the right place to the wrong place; the errant visitors might even have become better people through learning to read not just the first and last letter of a name but also the letters in between. But it is, essentially, a confusion that did not ever have to happen.

Once, we lived in Hartwell; a friend coming to visit one Saturday afternoon got on the Altona train rather than the Alamein, and lost two hours. Well, anyone can half read a sign. But the electrification of the line from Broadmeadows to Craigieburn has given Melbourne a new soundalike: now there is a Craigieburn line and a Cranbourne line, and it would be a stretch to find two stations that were so far apart on the suburban system, yet sounded so similar. I have to confess, I’ve been caught out a couple of times listening to half-garbled train announcements or rushing to get to the right platform at Flinders Street. So imagine you’re new to Melbourne: how easy would it be to go wrong?

Why, for that matter, would you even suspect there was a difference between a bus to Airport West and Melbourne Airport? Let’s not even get onto Hampton vs. Hampton Park, or the several hundred ‘Railway Parades’ and ‘Victoria Streets’ in our fair city.

In many ways, there are strong similarities between these problems and those of the English language generally. We are told by fans of English’s peccadilloes that it is a rich and diverse patchwork of historical accidents that connect us to Chaucer and the Bard, and to lose any component of our language stew is to lose our intellectual heritage; at the same time, we’re told that English is always changing and shifting, and that’s part of the pleasure – the important thing being that there be no hand in control of the changes. Similarly, local place names have local meanings (even if, like English, they are often second-hand, distorted, half-understood or non-understood meanings) and these are not to be messed with. Cranbourne and Craigieburn: two appropriated British place names of tenuous value, which we cannot tamper with because they have always been and must ever be.

I’m positing that place names are there to distinguish places from each other. Putting Manica two streets away from Mincha was a short-sighted decision. One of those names (or, to be absolutely fair, both of them) should be changed. Craigieburn and Cranbourne should be changed, too, or railway lines should be named for their orientation (South West Line, North West Line, or Hume Line, or whatever). Airport West should get a name that acknowledges, firstly, that when most Melbournians (much less most tourists) think of an Airport, they don’t think about Essendon Airport, and secondly, Airport West is a really bad name for a perfectly pleasant suburb. This is not interfering with a rich tapestry: it’s redefining it to make it richer. It’s also an opportunity to come up with new names that recognize women, indigenous people, and other concepts that did not previously get a look in when naming decisions were made in the past.

No doubt television news can hit the streets when this article is published and vox pop three random Airport Westers whose first response will be ‘Why change Airport West? Everyone knows where Airport West is.’ But then perhaps someone could give them a few minutes to consider all the times in the past where confusion has reigned. The next step of course would be to proactively come up with an option that didn’t just designate a place as west of one of Melbourne’s many Airports which no-one thinks of as ‘the airport’ anymore. It’s easy – it can even be lucrative, stripping out prejudice towards places perceived, for no good reason, as low status – but no-one wants to bite the bullet (or perhaps, seem pretentious). I wonder what Brian Mannix thinks? 

down near jacana station

But on the eastern side of the line.

new harry potter

There is a strange stillness in the air around Jacana/Broadmeadows/Westmeadows and I can only assume it is because everyone is tucked up in bed with the new Harry Potter. I have only read the first two and I think this is the fifth, so I have some catching up to do/surgical graft of interest before I get onto this one. Last night was The Cannanes at the Town Hall Hotel. I think there were about three people there I didn't know by name and those I'd seen before. And it was a small crowd anyway. A lot of people (well, four: Shane - Mark - Debbie - Olivia) were there earlier in the evening en route to something else (mainly the GoBs, but Olivia was going to some bizarre Arthouse thing - what was that about!?) but S, M and D returned to the Town Hall about half way through the Cs' set along with Toby. Olivia has a friend called Tristan who she and her friends call T-bone. I thought there was probably potential for giving everyone an initial+ name, and James said Toby was already known as T-boy (which is particularly good as it is an anagram too). But then I stalled on Olivia (I could only think of O-zone, which is pathetic - it's funny what other words come into your head, like I was thinking 'O for an Osram' - which was and perhaps still is a brand of lightbulb - in the Good Weekend last week they suggested that lightbulb brands were generic and no-one distinguished between them, of course I immediately thought 'O for an Osram' then too). For me, I could be D-notice, though I don't know what a D-notice is. Shane could be S-bend, or S-club 7, I'm sure there are plenty more S's. Marc I said could be M-train, but I bet there are many other M ones too. A people could be A-grade, A-bomb, A-political; B-grade, B-flat, B-good... C-plus, C-side... oh, I'm so good at this. X-file, Y-front, Z-andtwonoughts. D people could also be D-sease. The Cannanes show got off to a pretty bland start but it picked up and by the end they were really firing. Before that to kill time primarily I went to the Nova and saw My Summer of Love which struck me as having a very predictable and dull plot. I knew kind of what was going to happen (girls in small town fall in love, it goes bad) but I could tell from about the first five minutes (maybe that's an exaggeration - let's say ten) how and why and so on, and I was thinking 'oh, no, not that line of dialogue' before it happened. I really was killing time. I was actually about as bored during the movie as I had been during the pre-movie ads, most of which were repeated. What I really wanted to see was Sin City - even then only becuase it got such rave reviews and I wanted to scoff at the idea of a film that takes visually from the style of comic books/strips - just like I once scoffed so happily at Warren Beatty's Dick Tracy - but there were no appropriate sessions. Before the movie I went to the Architecture library and before that to Billy Hyde's and bought a hi-hat stand. It was pricey. But I really love it. So far. I spoke to Mia just as she and the entourage were pulling into Oakland. They're playing in SF tonight. They have made a second Possum Moods album (as Possum and the Moods now). Something to look forward to. I have run out of suspension files, which is fucked. Hopefully when I return to work on Monday I will be able to pinch or recycle some. People often just throw out suspension files, but they're pretty exy - well, about $1.50 at the cheapest stationery places, and that mounts up very fast. I must say the filing cabinet has never looked so healthy. I also borrowed Bob Dylan's Chronicles from the library yesterday but haven't really started on that yet. Instead for some reason I'm reading Wreckless Eric's biography which was also at the library. Today I am going to be cleaning, filing if possible, perhaps practicing drums and definitely finishing off my paper for the Wellington conference next year. Music played this morning: Both sides of The Motors' album (I really only like the first song each side), second side of Dave McArtney and the Pink Flamingos' first album (in honour of S. Moritz's particularly visceral response to the album cover artwork) and side one of Herbie Mann's Push Push, just to confirm I still don't like it. Next on the list? I think Flash and the Pan.