WELL DONE! Essays, Memoirs, and True Stories - THE VICTORIAN DANDENONGS by Margaret Pearce

The Victorian Dandenongs

Margaret Pearce

The Victorian Dandenongs, a unique and hilly area shaped by an upheaval of ancient volcanoes, is both impressive and inspirational in its beauty.

A lot of its unique character and environment has been much changed by settlement and clearances. Daniel Defoe who wrote Robinson Crusoe said that the first thing man did on settling an alien environment was to attempt to change it into a copy of his home environment.

This is a proven fact. New inhabitants import their culture, patterns of thinking and flora and fauna. They surround themselves with familiar things, build homes that are familiar, and plant their familiar gardens around them. Only then, homesickness eased, they settle in to the business of putting down roots.

In the Dandenongs, as everywhere else in Australia this custom of changing the environment through flora and fauna is well in evidence. There are cleared paddocks for grazing, food and flower crops that make the countryside look like a direct transplant from other countries.

The camellias, rhododendrons, magnolias, cedrillas, and other blossoming trees, azaleas, bulbs and other alien flowers decorate, enhance and enrich the Dandenongs both aesthetically and economically. However these change the basic timeless and primeval character of the hills as little as lace curtains around flying saucer portholes.

The less decorative flora was often brought in or sneaked in uninvited to ease the newcomer’s homesickness. With its successful invasion now well entrenched it turned feral. Buttercups, onion weed, blackberries, jasmine, honeysuckle, foxes, rabbits, cats, dogs and deer are now equally well in evidence. Only the feelings they arouse in local inhabitants are no longer homesickness. These invaders and intruders are now recognised and discouraged through the changing views of the inhabitants as to what they are, unwanted, ugly and destructive aliens.

Dedicated friends and lovers of the Dandenong’s clear waterways and bushland from the alien weeds choking them, replant the native vegetation and pursue the feral flora and fauna with unflagging and deadly enthusiasm. This is not a recent or late-come attitude to conservation. Since the beginning of settlement in the hills, the original greenies have argued and fought for conservation of the unique fern clad beauty of the gullies and tree covered hills to be preserved.

It is very much against Daniel Defoe’s view, but in an interesting reversal, it is the environment that is causing subtle but far reaching changes to the culture, character and nature of its inhabitants.

The survivors of the waves of settlers who moved into the Dandenong’s and coped with the harsh natural rhythms of flood, fire, drought, landslip, and other less natural disasters have been shaped by their experiences. To survive they had to adapt to the long series of hardship years and the occasional productive year. They have had to evolve a tenacity as deep rooted as the tap roots of the trees, a cheerful optimism as green as the new growth after fires and an endless patience and acceptance of life in the hills.

Charles Darwin wrote learnedly of flora and fauna in isolated places developing along its own unique lines. The Dandenong’s, shouldering itself above the tamed suburbs still gives that impression of isolation, as if it is some Robinson Crusoe type of island. Visitors and other pilgrims sense the difference between the Dandenongs and its encroaching suburbs as eons in time and in distance rather than a twenty minute drive.

The isolation, more imaginary than real in these days of good roads and tamed bushland, still subtly works and changes the attitudes and characters of the inhabitants.

First there is acceptance, as the hills become home and no longer an alien world and then the fanatic growth of the loyalty and love that the remaining corners of original environment inspire. Returning the bush environment and its inhabitants to at least a portion of its original self has become and continues to become an absorbing, satisfying and continuing crusade.

Secondly there is the growth of what might be called the cult of individualism. The Dandenongs could become one of the last bastions of that oddity in conventional society, the eccentric. This is often as marked as the architecture as it is in some of the dwellers.

Thirdly, the Dandenong’s also nurtures another facet of its inhabitants. Does the isolation and dreamtime primeval timelessness present in the hills and gullies encourage the growth of creativity in the crafts? Or are painters, writers, potters, sculptors and other craft workers attracted to the hills for their inspiration?

There is something about the atmosphere and character of the Dandenongs that makes the protective up swell in green and conservation movements seen as a natural progression. Things happen and keep on happening in the Dandenong’s. If you stand apart and look at it objectively it is oddly puzzling.

Community protests and other movements to protect and restore native environments rise and fall with apathy and disinterest. In the hills you only have to walk through the natural parks and their beauty spots to be aware of the long term and continuing determination to protect, preserve and restore.

The culmination of all dreams is the restoration of original flora and fauna. It is like a tantalising holy grail to restore the once-upon-a-time paradise of the Dandenongs before mining, logging settlement, clearances, land developers, even some businesses and the criminally careless mistakes tainted it.

Daniel Defoe’s statement doesn’t fit all situations. Although it is natural that the first desire of a new inhabitant is to alter an alien environment into a home environment, in the Dandenongs it is the other way around. It is the environment that works on the inhabitants. Their character, their attitudes, their culture and their definition of a home environment all subtly but permanently change to one which fits the hills themselves more comfortably.

And all benefit from the Dandenong’s loyal inhabitants and their definition of progress, to continue conserving and restoring the Dandenongs to as much of its original dreamtime self as it is possible.

Note from the author: I spent my teenage years belonging to a walking club and walked through it every week. The mountains rearing up outside Melbourne started off as a volcano. Have been settled here for the past thirty years.

Launched on an unsuspecting commercial world, Margaret Pearce, ended up copywriting in an advertising department and took to writing instead of drink when raising children. Margaret completed an Arts Degree at Monash University as a mature age student, and has primary and teenage novels published as listed on Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle and writers-exchange.com