Professional Documents
Culture Documents
WEEDS
IN
LATTELAND
an essay
on
camphor laurels, coffee,
democracy, streetscape, tourism
&
Bellingen
ROSS MACLEAY
To Bellingen with love and trepidation
fifteen year old leopard trees.
Where identity had seemed manifest and secure, the restless fingers
of planning-and-implementation now released the genie of history from its
confinement in ‘heritage’. Many saw Bellingen’s heritage, and so its identity, in
the tradition of the ‘one hundred year old’ camphors, mighty living organisms
that protected and graced the rites of Bellingen’s café society. Others saw the
camphors as giant weeds, mighty but only in the tradition of occupying invaders,
the ugly icons of their triumphalism. The camphors were either living monuments
or monumental weeds. Those who wanted to weed them out were, by their own
lights, renewing an older more venerable tradition, and redeeming its beauty for
the future. They were seen by those who wanted to keep the shady camphors as
wanting to strip the earth bare in the name of generic suburban ‘beautification’.
Each side invoked Gaia.
No that’s not really it. That is just one more way of putting it. One more
declaration about just what was or is at stake in the camphor war. Nearly everyone
who wrote a letter to the Courier Sun — the local paper that now traces its ownership
to Fairfax Media — seemed to take it for granted that their own interpretation was
the long awaited key to general enlightenment. ‘I realise that introducing facts in
the face of uninformed hysteria is largely a waste of effort and printer’s ink,’ wrote
David Halliday from up on the mountain at Dorrigo on January 5, ‘but here goes.’
Nearly every letter was a killer argument or a cry from the high ground. Everyone
was passionate, even in their expressions of exasperation at the whole irrelevant
spectacle, even if they were only eye-rolling. More than a division between two
sides, or a revelation of the fault lines through green sentiment and Gaia worship,
it was sometimes like a war of all against all. No one agreed with anyone about
everything. Church Street was a clashing universe of entertained and entertaining
opinions, enough strongly held to rumble beneath or erupt into and spice or sour
the most friendly or idle conversation. Shallow waters run in dangerous currents.
Natural and cultural heritage, coffee and tourism, all those shades of green
— romantic and scientific, sentimental and technocratic, capital ‘G’ and small ‘g’,
deep and shallow — each with its peculiarly trivial and important, demeaning and
edifying aspects, all were caught up in the hostilities. The camphor war seemed to
refract all this into its antagonistic, irreconcilable elements. As Edmund Burke is
supposed to have said at the start of the French Revolution: What a stage, what
players! Every Wednesday I found myself trembling with excitement as I opened
my copy of the Courier Sun, and turned to the letters page.
This was not the beginning though; or back before lifestyle
O n Wednesday 20 October, 2010. I noticed a letter beginning ‘I just
wanted to make everyone aware that Bellingen Council is planning to cut down
many of our beautiful trees in Church and Hyde Street, which make our streetscape
so cool in summer and so picturesque. Apparently they are classified as “Weeds”
and council has received funding to “beautify” our streetscape by planting new
trees which according to them are deemed more suitable.’ It was signed Ziggy
Koenigseder, Bellingen. Right next to it, in the two-column box where Bellingen
Shire Council regularly advertises development proposals, there was a notice:
The proposal was on exhibition for public comment up until 11 November 2010.
This was not the beginning though. Not really. This was in the middle of
things; politics and history is always like that. The back-story could start in 2002
when the Council prepared its CBD Management Plan, or 2006 when it adopted
its CBD plan, which included the proposal for the ‘progressive removal’ of the
camphors. The prospective development of Church Street, along with its removal
of the camphors, had been hanging around for a long time in the civic memory,
obscurely understood and seldom reflected upon. It was something that nearly
everyone wanted, but each according to their own image. Their own very particular
image. Beyond the odd ripple registered in the Courier Sun, or by citizens who had
taken the time to attend the ‘consultation process’, no one had bothered much, or
at least no more than is normal for Bellingen, where public meeting attendance is
probably well above the national average. The coffee drinker on Church Street’s
‘café strip’ just went on ordering coffees in the morning and deserting the street in
the afternoon, usually just around the time when, if I was in town, I was ready for
a cup and something sweet.
Or maybe things started back in the mid 90s when the southwestern section
of Church Street was paved and the cafés colonised the street, and a metropolitan
bourgeoisie began to pour into the Valley, attracted by lifestyle and real estate
opportunities. The paving was built in an iconic, raised-to-ankle-breaking-height
style with references to open stormwater drainage on the shopfront side. It had
heritage benches and lamps, with the. authentic 1990s heritage look. It had tree-
guards-cum-planter-boxes around the camphors and newly planted leopard trees.
The leopards had an accompaniment of murraya, cunjevoi or native elephants ears,
This was not the beginning though; or back before lifestyle
and assorted horticultural colour. Periclean Mayor Sue Dethridge was all ready to
cut the red ribbon when a bunch of clowns took over. History records that Petal
handed the mayor a pair of garden shears to do the honours, and with Sid on drum
and Taco on trombone, Floomey and Bluff serenaded an urban space that would
rival the Piazza San Marco. A year or so later there was a scare that the kiddies were
eating the cunjevois in the planter boxes while their parents drank coffee. The child
killers went and now the only plant remaining, besides the leopards, is a weedy little
murraya, joining the camphors, cocos palms and cadaghi as one of the suite of
environmental weeds gracing the piazza. The planter boxes are still good for sitting
on, penning toddlers and letting the dog have a piss.
No. It all started before that, back in the 80s when café society seeped
into a Bellingen where cannabis, not caffeine, was still the most famous drug. And
even that was in the wake of the 1970s when an earlier, younger, poorer but still
bourgeois wave of settlers had arrived with enough pooled cash to buy up old farms.
Pre sea-changers, they arrived back before life style had been properly invented,
hoping and expecting to invent something else. But when they got labelled hippies
and alternative lifestyle, they ended up helping to invent lifestyle despite their best
intentions. Those that survive remember the decline and fall of the old Elite Café,
unacknowledged heritage that slipped into oblivion. La Bohème and then Martha &
Mario’s, down the river end of Church Street were the warm up acts of 80s café
society. And The Boiling Billy was already doing its heritage mix of flat white and
Prince of Wales tea when Barry Smith parachuted into town and refurbished the
Hammond & Wheatley Emporium with its Carriageway Café running long and narrow
and metropolitan down the western side. With that, naturalists recorded possible
sitings of baristas and the espresso machines were all fired up and frothing.
On the other hand maybe this all started when environmentalism embraced
restoration ecology back in the 1970s, or when in the 80s and 90s bureaucracies
took to restoration ecology in their own way and camphors became environmental
weeds. Or it starts when the ‘100 year old’ camphors in Church Street were planted,
by who knows whose hands. Or in the late nineteenth century when camphors
became the tree of choice to replace the shade cleared too hastily from the north
coast valleys, or even when the first camphors came to Australia sometime back
in the 1820s.
The Bellingen Dreamtime v. the Tree Retention
Priority Matrix
We justify or explain something in terms of something else. That’s what
reasons are. When someone tries to say that something, like a tree, is valuable in
itself or for itself, few are impressed. It sounds desperate. The word ‘why’ urges
us elsewhere: away to the wider world, to the greater good, to the deeper principle.
No wonder then that justification can end up as a kind of exercise in distraction, a
cosmic trick played on us by the ruse of reason. No wonder that debate is always
leading us away from what matters, and our thoughts go ‘cluttering like a hey-go
mad’ as Laurence Sterne said ‘and by treading the same steps over and over again,
they presently make a road of it.’ So the camphor debate shot off to tourism, to
environmental weed strategies, to consultation and political process, to amenity, to
personalities, to childhood memories and to heritage. Anything to avoid the issue.
Even though the Council’s consultant had declared the Church Street camphors
heritage, thus making it official, in Bellingen the most well worn tracks lead to
heritage anyway, ‘and the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive them
off it’.
Traces of the past, and even the rubble history, have their chance to be
made good by a peculiar kind of prestige, which only the tyranny of time and
incumbency can authorise. We recognise such prestige with the title ‘heritage’.
What survives could be a worthy building, it could be a trivial or ugly object, or it
could be the result of a terrible injustice. It could have started as a seedling planted
in a thoughtless, ignorant, unhappy or long forgotten moment, and ended up as a
tree displaying its heritage in signs of growth, maturity, and decline. At the same
time though, the stupidity, the ignorance, the triviality, the ugliness or the injustice
of the past can persist as traces too, even in the most esteemed heritage. Not
annihilated, they also wait in history to come back and haunt us.
‘When George Moore began drawing his architectural gems for Bellingen,
the Camphor Laurels had already been in Church Street about 20 years’ — so
said a letter in the January 5 Courier Sun. Like its author, known only as ‘Still
Distressed And Disgusted’, I had already found myself turning to history for some
high ground. The big distraction for me was: just how old were these camphors,
really? It was one little mound for me to try and get to. In shallow waters any
This Bellingen Dreamtine v. the Tree Retention Priority Matrix
mound is high ground.
It became routine for the tree’s advocates to call them ‘one hundred year
old camphors’. Heritage was at stake here and heritage is measured according to
age, and according to the prestige of the ancestors who have left it in their wake.
When I finally headed to the Bellingen Museum for the facts, a lead camphor
campaigner, Ziggy Koenigseder, had already been there. I didn’t know the guy on
the desk, but he suggested I could save time and find out from her. But I wasn’t
going to trust the advice of anyone else on this. This was high ground I wanted to
get to myself, my high ground. I didn’t trawl through the museum’s archives but I
did buy copies of two little publications, Bellingen The Beautiful, a tourist promotion
booklet first printed in March 1933, and George Moore, Architect and Builder, written
and edited for the Historical Society by Norman Braithewaite and Stan Day. And,
after years of living in Bellingen, I finally paid a sub to join the Historical Society. By
the time Ziggy sent a letter to the Courier Sun on February 9 pushing the camphors’
age out to 110 years, I had worked out my story.
About 1919, give or take a couple of years, two camphor laurel seedlings
were planted on the eastern side of Church Street next to the Bellingen Court
House. I have no idea who dug the holes, who raised the seedlings, who had the
honour of planting them or on what occasion. Two more were planted opposite
them on the western side at the same time, or maybe a few years later. I have no
first hand testimony to support this, only photos, and supplementary text here and
there.
Exhibit A is a photo of Church St taken some time after 1916. I came
across it on page 11 of Pioneering in The Bellinger Valley, another book compiled
by Norm Braithwaite, this time with Harold Beard, a book that had already been
on my bookshelf and plenty of others in Bellingen for 20 years. Along with the
George Moore book this is one of those small treasures that a generation of local
historians has left to the citizens of Bellingen. The photo on page 11 does not
show any trees — at least not on the western side of the street. In the foreground
there are horse-drawn wagons delivering goods to the Hammond and Wheatley
Emporium, the ‘Mammoth Trade Palace’, which looms large in the background.
The photo shows the extension to the Emporium, the great shed on its eastern side.
This shed is now the St Mark’s Basilica of Bellingen’s most beautiful square: The
Pub Carpark.. According to page 22 of George Moore, Architect and Builder the shed
was not completed until 1917.
The photo does not show the Bank of Australasia on the northwest
corner of the Church Street and Hyde Street crossroads. This corner was the site
of Bellingen’s first Catholic Church, built in 1881. The Methodist church was on
the southeast corner, diagonally opposite. Hence the name Church Street. The
bank wasn’t built until 1921. I suppose there could be small, planted camphor
This Bellingen Dreamtine v. the Tree Retention Priority Matrix
seedlings hidden behind the horses and wagons, but I doubt it. So 1917 looks like
the earliest date that the camphors on the western side of Church Street could
have been planted.
A photo from 1932-3 in Bellingen The Beautiful shows the biggest camphor,
the one on the southeast corner, at about 10m high and 8m wide. I reckon thirteen
years is enough time for a vigorous camphor growing in sun on river terrace soil
to reach this size. This camphor on the southeast corner always was and still is
the most vigorous of the four. In July 2010 Bellingen Shire Council’s consultant
arborist, Nigel Smith, gave its height at 18m with a crown diameter of 22m. Always
referred to as ‘the arborist’ and never by his name, The Arborist rated this tree’s age
as ‘mature’, its vigour ‘good’ and its condition ‘fair’, enough to give it a ‘Sustainable
Retention Index Value©’ of 9 out of 10. The copyrighter here is the Institute of
Australian Consulting Arboriculturists, the backbone and guarantor of consulting
arboriculturists. The Institute designed its index ‘as an objective system based on
set criteria’. The Arborist also rated the tree’s ‘significance’, according to another
of the Institute’s rating systems, as ‘medium’. This system called ‘STARS©’ is
designed to corral the subjectivity of value judgement. Consulting aborists are
cautious and predictable souls who seem to prefer relative anonymity. They navigate
the troubled waters of aesthetic judgement, plant pathology, and professional
liability, while the paying clients and hungry community groups thrash and circle.
They pour the gooey oil of potential insurance claims on the dangerous waters of
beauty. They prepare their defences with minced words and decision matrices to
give themselves the consistency — some might say ‘objectivity’ — demanded of
professional authority. The ‘Tree Retention Value - Priority Matrix’ (no ‘©’ on this
one) returned a ‘Medium’ rating: ‘Consider for Retention’.
Another photo from the 1920s — I would say mid-20s — shows the same
tree at 5m high and 4m across. The photo is in George Moore, Architect and Builder
and shows four of Moore’s buildings, the Post Office, the Police Station, The
Court House and Hammond & Wheatley’s Emporium. They were all built between
1909 and 1910, on either side of Church St, in a rare flourish that still defines the
streetscape in the middle of Bellingen. This photo shows the Bank of Australasia
too, built in 1921 by Moore’s former apprentice Wally Boulton. Making estimations
from growth rates is risky but these two photos are consistent with a planting of
the western trees around 1919 give or take a year or two.
The Courier Sun editor, Greg McLagan, wrote the paper’s lead article about
the meeting of the Council on 15 December 2010. The article quoted the Planner’s
report, prepared by Keiley Hunter. It said the trees were planted between 1940 and
1950. The same article reported a claim by Councillor and former mayor Gordon
Braithwaite that they were planted about 1870 by ‘Mr Hammond’. 1870 was back in
This Bellingen Dreamtine v. the Tree Retention Priority Matrix
the Bellingen dreamtime, less than a decade after a cluster of huts at the tidal limit
of the Bellinger River started to define a small town. I guess this is the same Bill
Hammond who was born in Melbourne in 1878 and who, with Arthur Wheatley,
the business partner he’d met on the Orara goldfields, got George Moore to build
the Emporium out of new fangled, solid concrete bricks in 1909. A Second World
War aerial survey photo taken at 12:37pm on 2 July 1943 shows four trees. The
crowns of the two on the eastern side are about 15m to 18m wide, those on the
western side are about 8m to 10m wide. I’d say the smaller ones had not grown
with the same vigour as the bigger ones, and that they were probably all nearly 25
years old. Now in 2011 Bellingen’s ‘one hundred year old camphors’ must be in
their early 90s.
But for what it’s worth, what’s all that worth? I don’t know if it’s exactly
right. It’s not my last word. It’s just one more take on history added to the pile.
As for ancestors, two of Bellingen’s were made for invocation in Church
Street legend. They frame the time when the ‘gateway’ camphors were planted, just
as the camphors themselves frame the entrance to the street. George Moore made
Bellingen look like Bellingen. In the decade before his death in 1917 he built most
of the impressive buildings on the south side of the main street a hundred metres
either side of the camphor laurels. By the 1950s and 60s, when the rest of country
NSW was doing over its streetscapes, Bellingen was too strapped to afford it. The
look of the town was preserved by the decline of the North Coast dairy industry,
and then along came the 70s and 80s and heritage made it official. The result of a
century of poverty followed by heritage is that hardly anything inspiring has been
built since 1920. There have been some timely refurbishings like the pub and the
Emporium, but most recent buildings date themselves as pop faux-heritage post-
modern. The only good building in Church Street in the last hundred years is Steve
Gorrell’s toilet, built in the Court House park. But the park itself was buggered
up when the Justice Department grabbed back the judge’s car park, and person or
persons unknown planted a cadaghi to kill what lawn remained and hide George
Hewitt’s Queensland Waratah tree.
George Hewitt arrived in 1926, just about when the camphors were
sending out the roots that would ‘wreak havoc’ with the paving. He came from
Sydney and took up his practice as a country doctor. Hewitt made Bellingen look
like Bellingen too. He planted trees, a strange and wonderful collection from all
over Australia and the world.
Even Bob Brown makes it into this history. John Bailey wrote to the January
5 Courier Sun about playing marbles with Bob’s brother under the camphors, back
in the 1950s when Bob’s father was stationed as a policeman, two-doors down
the main street in George Moore’s police station. This memory was used as an
opportunity to put the boot into Bob and the local Greens (more on them later).
Informed taste and romantic enthusiasm; or the North Coast Camphor Wars
The Brown’s had moved to Bellingen after the 8 year old future Senator had been
fondled by a teacher in Armidale. This is where someone says ‘that’s why Bob
is gay’. The spectacle of marbles joined tree climbing as part of the heritage of
bygone childhood pleasures that the camphors had graced.
That’s my story. During troubled times history becomes a refuge. It seems
to offer stable ground: what happened in the past has actually happened, and
that is taken as history’s guarantee. Ignoring the fact that the past happened as
something ambiguous to, and fought over by, those who lived through it, we tell
history as if the sheer fact of its having happened guaranteed our claims — and as
if the facts about the past are easier to know now than they were then. Or easier
to know than what is happening now. Because who knows what is happening
now? We are the parochial children of our own age, and we like to think time has
clarified history’s details for us, when in fact it obscures them and annihilates them,
erases the connections that define events, renders accounts less adequate or false,
and generates myth and legend. It becomes easy to make things look like facts,
precisely because the annoying and inconsistent details have been tidied away.
Heritage, conceived as the material traces of the past, stands with all the
authority of an historical document, but we experience it and pass it on as we do
history’s facts, fraught with interpretation. As long as heritage is something taken
to be made true or at least authentic by time, or something justified by time, it is
never far from being mythological.
‘Paving is being uprooted and distorted by big roots, paint is peeling off
rotted timber street furniture and retaining boards, deep gutters smell of rotted
leaves and pose a real danger to café employees, diners and pedestrians alike, dogs
poo and pee everywhere and the pavement is stained by years of food droppings
and spillages. There’s bird droppings on furniture and pavers. Ambience? The
area has the ambience of a wet and dreary car wrecker’s yard….Like it? Proud of
it? Want to keep it that way?
Does this space encourage cashed up visitors, local diners, community
events or night time use? Does this space ‘do Bellingen proud’? Or is this space
just a waste of space?
18
Latte Town of The Year; or from the burnt seeds of a weedy shrub
It was signed L. Saunders, Bellingen. Maybe by being so outrageously, gloriously
negative this letter just wanted to break through the complacency of Bellingen’s
over indulged identity. Apart from that, when I read this tirade, what struck me
was something that seemed like affection, even tenderness.
Karaoke; or democracy
I n one of the January 5 letters, Adrian Wolfin reported that The
Council meeting on 15 December was ‘a mockery of democracy’. A ‘well know
businesswoman’ had pointed out to him that ‘members of the gallery were silenced
and not allowed to ask questions.’ On 12 January Anne Thompson wrote that ‘she
was appalled at the way the discussion was controlled’. On January 19 Solveig
Larsen was ‘truly amazed that our Council was intent upon the removal of the
one hundred year old trees…without proper community consultation’. And, with
the letters in the Courier Sun running four to one in favour of the camphors, Ziggy
Koenigseder wrote ‘It is obvious that they are all deaf to our wishes’. Back at the
meeting itself — as the Courier Sun told it — the ‘horticulturalist’ Richard Peters
told off the ‘fraud’ Sean Tuohy: ‘You got in on a Green ticket. I voted for you.’
Sean Tuohy’s response — ‘That doesn’t make me your slave’ — was a kind of heat-
of-the-battle version of Edmund Burke’s line: ‘Your representative owes you, not
his industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he
sacrifices it to your opinion’. Incidentally, the gentlemen of Bristol tossed Burke
out of parliament for his troubles; although, he did end up getting back in on a
kind of eighteenth century gerrymander — a ‘pocket borough’. Right back in her
first letter Ziggy Koenigseder had been clear about all this: the ratepayers are the
21
Karaoke; or democracy
Council’s ‘employers’.
While principles of democratic process were being clarified, the Councillors
themselves made very few public comments, other than at Council meetings. Local
councillors seldom write letters to the paper. Apart from there being too many
issues to write on, they are wary of mixing it in a forum where debate can fly off
in any direction at any time and where a response to such a turn has the potential
to bog down in week after week tit for tat. A bog can muddy the debate and the
debaters. For peace of mind councillors probably prefer to stay out and stay clean
and dry. All they have to do is resist the urge to grab the mike and get up and sing
on the letters page. At the same time, there is no being guided by any opinion
polls like the ones that complicate and steer the furious feedback phenomena of
national politics. Bellingen had to make do with Cherie Pugh polling a sample of a
hundred and publishing the pro-camphor statistic of 82% in a letter to the March
16 Courier Sun. It would have been easy to cry methodology, but easier to stay quiet.
Lacking party polling, minders, publicity officers, talk back radio, and sound bites,
local Councillors came across in all the camphor clamour as deafeningly silent.
When Luke Hartsuyker did his photo op under the camphors — I assume
with a press release attached — the Mayor Mark Troy responded with what I
also assume was his own press release. The Courier Sun gave the local Mayor
second billing to the local member in its article: ‘Member for Cowper weighs into
Camphor debate’. In the paper’s words (there were no quotation marks) Mark
Troy was ‘surprised and disappointed that Mr Hartsuyker hadn’t consulted with
Council before making representations to Anthony Albanese, the federal Minister
for Infrastructure. The Church Street funding was part of the post-GFC ‘Stimulus
Package’, so I wouldn’t have been all that surprised to read a headline like ‘Stimulus
Spending Scandal Causes Local Heartache’. State and federal politicians feed out
press releases with lines like that every day, for most local councillors though, press
releases remain a last resort. There is a whiff of spin and media management about
them, putting them at odds with the public meetings, the volunteer groups and the
word-of-mouth networks of community politics.
It was through such a network that I got in touch with Kerry Child, one
of the Council majority that voted in favour of cutting down two of the camphors
in Church Street. I emailed her and confessed: ‘I am a closet essay writer and I
am writing one on the camphor story.’ I was wondering if she could spare some
time to talk about it. I knew I could rely on her for information. I wanted to know
her thoughts. We met for a coffee of course. Kerry brought a stack of Council
papers and we talked for close on two hours. Every second person seemed to
say hello to her. OK. So local politics works through networks of community
groups, contacts, shared interests and friends. Work, sport, art, nature, politics,
friends, neighbours, first names, all that. This is civil society, but is it openness? Is
22
Karaoke; or democracy
it community consultation? Where is the democratic forum? Is it the media? The
Council Chambers? Church Street itself ?
Community consultation? Being someone in a consultation process is not
much different from being no one. Hence the bright idea of pairing the palliative
concept of ‘ownership’ with ‘consultation’. A ‘consultative process’ has its own
momentum. Once it’s going you wonder if it isn’t a kind of self-steering machine
started up by as yet undescribed cosmic forces. The Church Street process had
been going on since 2002. Community meetings are lifestyle in Bellingen. People
think it’s sort of fun. For some people the machine is like a ride. Of course we
have engineers who specialise in managing the ‘consultative process’. A competent
engineer has to make sure the momentum is already driving relentlessly towards the
desired conclusion. It’s a bit like a nuclear reactor. Not a lot can go wrong unless a
tsunami of outrage breaches the reactor core. The engineers show powerpoints®,
engage in dialogue, and fill white boards. They instruct people in the laws that, like
those of physics, are beyond the power even of the gods to change. They bring
the issues, the aims and objectives, the options, the criteria, and their decision
matrices. Or rather they anticipate them and elicit them from the meeting and
they insert them like fuel rods and control rods into the reactor. But it’s a Faustian
art: the engineer only becomes a master of it by letting the machine master her
or him. When the people finally look upon the result, The Thing is an utterly
banal and cosmically alien monster. Who could have made this? Whoever ‘they’
is, only they could have. Drinking coffee might be less unsettling — the caffeine
notwithstanding — and more productive. But some people like the adrenalin that’s
unleashed when the consultation gets going. Maybe they have a double espresso
before the meeting.
These analogies are glib, but the world conceives itself this way —
sometimes unconsciously —and makes itself glib. As part of modern life we
don’t so much make comparisons in order to describe how democracy works,
we conceive and practice democracy in ways that match our glib analogies. Thus
capitalism has always flattered itself and degraded democracy by comparing it to
a market place. Polls are like ratings and we change governments with no greater
consequence than changing TV channels. Or cafés. Forms of life from one sphere,
say pop culture, are reflected and repeated and make an eerie re-appearance to
haunt us in other spheres such as politics.
Consider the candidates for Bellingen’s democratic forum:
The media — i.e. the Courier Sun — is an organ of entertaining stimulus
and response. It’s got the Fairfax franchise, it’s got incumbency, advertising and
a distribution network. Its popular enough, and it sells enough advertising. The
reporting is mostly off the shelf like a supermarket, but with local specials and
a deli for the discerning taste. More than anything else, what sells it is the letters
23
A more Euclidean universe; or quaint hyper-realities
page. It works like an open mike, or a karaoke machine. You get the impression
that the lyrics are supplied and the performances amateur, uneven, vulnerable, but
sort of admirable for all that. Passion and enthusiasm are often semi-disguised as
hamming or overstatement or air guitar. People who write on behalf of community
groups are like nervous singers who don’t want to be on stage, so busy trying to
stay in tune you hardly hear them in all the excitement, or they are too boring or
excruciating to listen to. I wrote a letter from Landcare, but it didn’t make the cut.
People who cite their credentials come across like self-styled crooners who go
excruciatingly out of tune on the big notes. Occasionally there is a true prose stylist
like the now quiet Trevor Joyce, or a commentator-at-large like Darcey Browning,
the oracle of Darkwood. When someone writes a clear, sincere letter there is the
pleasure of relief, even if you don’t agree. In the camphor debate, especially if I
liked the person who wrote them, I’d want to switch sides.
Then there is the Council’s intimate little Chamber. It mostly puts on
obscure dramas scripted by its Agenda and the attached papers. It’s like boring,
subsidised, high culture. But occasionally it packs in a full house to watch, and
sometimes the audience tries to stage its own script or at least heckle. Everyone is
‘appalled’.
As for Church Street itself ? I suppose it is a kind of promise that café
society is its own shady agora, and it brings to the polis what the other places lack:
coffee and cake with ambience.
Anyway, a sense of the Council’s silence must have driven David Breaden,
in his long, questioning letter of January 26, to ask the Council to ‘share…matters
openly and accurately for community information and response. Community
frustration over these matters is boiling over.’ With the media so loud, the Council’s
eight years of discussions and tabled documents sounded no different from silence.
And the failure of all that ‘boiling over’ to change the Council’s decision was no
different from good old lack-of-consultation. Ah democracy! if that’s what you
call it.
This morning I dropped off a gas bottle at Carl Foster’s garage. I said hello
to Kerry Child who was over at the NRMA counter. I went round to Oak Street
and signed a couple of cheques at the Landcare office, and I walked back past the
Gelato Bar and saw the window being washed. A wounded James Dean was looking
back out at the War Memorial. I dropped a DVD of Caro Diario into the tardus at
the video store — the old billiard room — and walked on down the main street. I
met one of Bellingen’s green veterans, one of the generation who had helped stop
a woodchip mill at Coffs Harbour — a seaside suburb of Bellingen — back in the
1970s. He was pushing a walking frame back up the street and had a go at me for
walking too fast. None of that flâneur stuff for me. I went down the lane beside
the pub and bought a loaf of bread at the Hearthfire, the hole in the wall bakery and
café at the back of the former Carriageway. A credit to bread.
When I came out I walked round into the Pub Carpark. The fig was big and
dark on the north of the square. It was the first sunny day after a wet subtropical
month: It made me think of two lines of poetry:
The exceeding brightness of this early sun
Makes me conceive how dark I have become
31
Streetscape as art; or democracy as artist
Two backpackers, arm in arm, were dawdling in front of me, talking in
a sing-song language. I left them for dead and walked between the Great Shed
and the Environment Centre — the recycled Funeral Parlour — and turned into
Church Street, through ‘the precinct’ itself. I did a bit of research, checked a few
details, and then retreated round past the Court and the Police Station to pick up
mail at the Post Office. When I walked back up to Church Street the Square-tailed
Kite was hovering above The Map of the known world, looking north. I looked at
the streetscape and tried to imagine what ‘magnificent’ would look like. I thought
about slipping into the Tuckshop, getting a coffee and staring back out through the
glazing while running through mental ‘concept plans’ of Church Street missing
four, three, two, or one camphor. But I gave it a miss. I had things to do.
So here we are, still only at the beginning: the northern end of Church
Street screened off with hoardings, the malling and paving in process; coffee still
being drunk in the café strip under the heritage weeds. The Courier Sun’s news
on March 30 was that only one camphor would be cut down. The headline was
‘Camphor compromise’. It was a budget thing: cutting down two would cost
$122k; cutting down just the eastern one would only cost $70k. In the letters
John Tickle talked about ‘a solid gold chainsaw and a diamond studded cherry
picker’. The whole-of-streetscape cost was around $800k. The front page photo
showed a group of residents gathered with placards under the earmarked eastern
camphor: “Don’t Cut The Heart Out Of Bellingen.’ Kay Phillips in her April 6
letter was ‘disgusted’ that the town was ‘still full of apathy’. At the Council meeting
Councillor David Scott realised he had a problem with the Master Plan: ‘We need
to take another look at it’. The art is streescape; Democracy is the artist.
In its first camphor article back on October 27, the Courier-Sun reported
that the camphors would be replaced with leopard trees. Church Street with an
avenue planting of leopard trees! That bit of misinformation was enough to get
me started. I even ended up at a consultative committee on tree selection. So
right from the start I declare myself: I will be satisfied with nothing less than big
figs, white booyongs, ringwoods, weeping lilly pillies and cudgeries. Even these are
compromises. Like everyone I will be disappointed and exasperated. Everyone will
be appalled...
Bellingen
October, 2010 — April, 2011