Canberra is a transitional vacillating experiment – Walter Burley Griffin Separation penetrates the disappearing person like a pigment and steeps him in a gentle radiance – Walter Benjamin I have always liked the drive into the city on the Murray’s bus, the final few minutes as the coach passes the long blocks of Northbourne Ave. It feels right, that there should be this pause, where the chatter builds and bodies begin to agitate. Deferral cloaks the history of Canberra, from the city’s slow and partial realising of Walter and Marion’s architectural vision, to the temporary permanency of the original parliament house building that stayed in place for over sixty years, to the latent atmosphere of its wide boulevards and sprawling bush parklands. A sense of hyphenated time is built into the city’s architecture. Northbourne Ave, a neutral and unremarkable arterial road: when You Are Here festival approached me for this commission, I knew immediately my subject. A decade ago I had lived in my first sharehouse a block from the Lyneham border and I have never forgotten the slow pulse of traffic rising and falling between the lights, like a mild ocean. In this stretch of road I register the receding–recurring thrall of whole worlds; although I have lived much of my life outside Canberra’s borders, consistently my years have been punctuated by this back-and-forth, long highway trips and those last restless moments before arrival. Now, dug up, absent of its trees, bloated with development banners and new tracts of weeds, Northbourne has never been more interesting. Architecture critic Sylvia Lavin gives us the term ‘invisible form’ to think about sites such as Northbourne, in its current state: ‘work that has not been hidden from view but that has nonetheless not been historically witnessed’. As adults we are conditioned to glance over construction work; its bright oddments are so ubiquitous as to be almost completely metabolised by our senses.
Writing in the 1920s, philosopher Walter Benjamin addresses the construction site early on in his short, eccentric volume One Way Street, appropriately recognising that children are the first and truest researchers of place: ‘They are irresistibly drawn by the detritus generated by building, gardening, housework, tailoring or carpentry. In waste products they recognise that the face of the world of things turns directly and solely to them’. Such sites maintain a strikingly performative outreach for adults, too – with public works I often feel a certain paternalistic sentiment is being writ large. In the activities of power tools and in the disembowelment of earth, cordoned off by fluorescent bollards and safety notices, the bureaucracy signals a version of care, your future is being worked on, while uniformed workers reconfigure the ground itself, and our vantage – such scenes manifest with endless improvisatory potential – a kind of social engineering takes place. And something else: construction is the most concrete sign we have of that high abstraction, money, passing though. –––– ... When we were young ... ... endless adventures ... ... long lazy days ... ...do you remember? We had the world ... That was real living ... ... Hours rolled by Canberra’s next chapter begins here ... ... there upon a wall ... ... art resting here and there ... ... we are busy people ... Thanks for noticing ... ... not everyone stops by ...
The tracts of public housing along the Northbourne corridor have been sold off to developers, who are pushing luxury apartments and hotels under the literal name and sign of art. Like texts from a bad date, Art Group’s sly messaging creeps along banners at the Dickson precinct, one of three concerns – going by the names ‘Mulberry’, ‘Soho’ and ‘On Forbes’ – that this developer holds along the strip. Cobbling these fragments of text together, I am reminded how the use of the ellipsis has radically transformed with the evolution of social media. Where it once functioned as a knowing wink between writer and reader, a shorthand for shared knowledge, more often ellipses are used now as a destabilising tactic, a sign of indirect critique or misleading omission. It is the passive-aggressive language tool of the bully. ‘Thanks for noticing ...’. There is much to notice. There is much left absent. The gutted facade of the Dickson flats had yet to be demolished when I last walked by, but the decades-long presence of public housing in this area has entirely disappeared in the image of the city the developers are selling. This might seem like no big deal; after all, the government has been rehousing the former residents and is committed to building more public housing elsewhere, including at a new Dickson site a few blocks away (although for the most part, way out elsewhere in the suburbs, where there is little public transport and no new tram coming anytime soon). Such is the destructive largesse of gentrification, that the broader and wealthier public are conditioned by its process to soon forget what they know. The current period of gentrification in Canberra has intensified greatly since You Are Here festival started up. Artists have always foretold the ways of the broader culture, but in the contemporary moment this translating process has fast turned to dislocation. I want to digress for a moment back to Art Group and its logo. That encircled, floating A references the copyright symbol, a proprietary emblem used to denote ownership of a text. Here Art becomes trapped by its own signature of self-administered
authority; this logo formalises the gentrification at work, which is class erasure under the false sign of art. Sarah Schulman is an activist who has tirelessly traced the human impact of gentrification, most notably alongside the long-lasting impact of the AIDS crisis in New York City. She writes: ‘Ignoring the reality that our cities cannot produce liberating ideas for the future from a place of homogeneity keeps us from being truthful about our inherent responsibilities to each other’. Construction works offers us a minor moment of rupture, which can spark a reconsideration of what we value in our cities. In the case of the Northbourne Ave development, we can expect the tram to shuttle middle-class workers between office and home – to enhance their productivity. We might speculate that tourist spending will increase. But what more might a public ask for? While this development may uphold an infrastructural promise, the project fails the test of the Griffins’ more radical utopian imaginary. Perhaps it should: local government has emphasised the significance of the tram-line as at last fulfilling the architects’ original plan. The city has always been in thrall to the Griffins even while disobeying them at almost every turn. But Canberra now has something far richer on which to draw as it imagines itself into the future: an additional 100+ years of local knowledge and a profoundly changed world. –––– There is no programmatic method for how I write all this into a poem. The architect Bernard Tschumi, working against form, talks about the pleasure of his work as being not about building, as you would expect, but rather undoing: ‘My pleasure has never surfaced in looking at buildings, at the ‘great works’ of the history or present of architecture, but rather in dismantling them’. Also working against form, I view poems not as a kind of essential reduction but as imaginative and textual excess. In preparing for this particular poem I’ve been walking, reading, talking to people, taking photos. I’ve looked at old planning reports, stopped to
read plaques and signage, and to identify plants, watched dashcam and other footage on YouTube. I’ve been idling – I’ve been thinking. And I’ve been writing, by which I mean I persist with a blank page until something happens, and then I start a new page and repeat. By a very slow process of accrual, what finally emerges is the poem, a small and free thing, that might trespass dulled senses and allow new insights to form.
Bibliography Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street, and Other Writings. Verso Classics, 1997. Griffin, Walter Burley, and Griffin, Dustin H. The Writings of Walter Burley Griffin. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Lavin, Sylvia, Flash in the Pan, Architecture Words 13, Architectural Association London, 2015 Schulman, Sarah, et al. The Gentrification of the Mind Witness to a Lost Imagination. University of California Press, 2012. Tschumi, Bernard. “Disjunctions.” Perspecta, vol. 23, 1987, pp. 108–119.
Excerpt from Northbourne Ave
How vulnerable the bodily archive, reproduction and memory. A banner juts out. I shrug off my jacket and begin to bloom. I enter the dreams of the sleeping students. Their pressures and agendas. Even the trees in their grave stature seem flirtatious. They believe in hand signals and coteries. My calves ache, and my wrists. There is no one around. I am at the hotel carpark. It begins to rain. I am at the petrol station. I am at the cinema. There is the problem of the freak windstorm. I am out until late. I am calling an Uber. I am calling someone. What argument? You can’t twist my arm – I am serious. I am at fault. But I am changing. Movement like air it’s how we live
The tree trunks are lying somewhere in the Molonglo valley. What it’s like for a body to move. The mountains were pure setting at first. Discreet neighbourhoods of 2000 souls. An organised and tourable city. Scripted – my script – will you say this: ‘proximity and flyness’. You’ll dream in this configuration: left, right, right. Quiet, uncanny, for whole decades. You may be stunned by a person’s hatred of the slope. At the colonnades I had recognised the wrong person. We spoke. I felt the ache of always being local. Attaching to symptoms. Is this bias? Protesters and their certainty and their tough white crosses
It’s hard to sketch something from just two or three mediocre feelings. ‘I was alone in the room and this is what I did’. It might be an easy summer or rough decade. I might walk and walk. Witches hats in formation; an instance of colour popping grace in this world. Inscrutable. Witches hats in their bleached or shaded setting. Fencing also propped about. Someone signals the driver. What life is like. Temporary. The garden industry is hurting. Swollen weeds seeded through the piles of dirt. Sheet metal rarely rusts. This place is pure vector; the future is screen. You can believe in the scenic but don’t just – look. Read it and trace. Resize and reflow. Like Marion Mahony Mystic. This strip is mostly private a little public land public land public land public land public land public land
This evening quiet is perverse, every window shut and pitch black streets. Every block has introduced a texture, scabrous raked-over pine. Dashcam footage of a kangaroo. Seedlings. Something new is getting started; bureaucratic (unpeopled) and so clean
Only it is so surprising to be trapped by light in this ordinary way and so then giving over a body (mine, yours, ours) to join the public body (theirs). I can’t temper language to tell you how to be in there – how normal. The brittle gums. A fault of mine: I was in my head all those years rewriting a lot of memories. This unavoidable overlay starches each visit. Then softens. You’ve got to somehow – pull – each side at once to create tension (smooth things over). Then, flagging, you see you’ve covered the distance of eight whole precincts. We see everything in a heap, discarded or latent. But there is evidence of a high level of safety. Work boots, coloured bibs. We are now – outdoors
I was trying to cross to the shade. Are the cars going anywhere? Reduce, reduce, but it’s vital to the character of the bush capital. I walked past many likenesses, I felt born. Squandered time – simply the feelings of ten years prior overlaid. I woke up as I was walking and found myself stuck to a new asphalt strip. Can you follow a whole thought
