It was early on a Wednesday morning that Lee, Finn and I made our way from the University to the Australian Native Garden in Royal Park, crossing only a short distance over a couple of roads to reach the space. Though I’d been to some spaces close to the city, I was little prepared for how close this one was. You wouldn’t have known you were so close to the city if it wasn’t for the sound of cars.
The space layed out in front of us was shockingly vast; clumps of native plants hugged the pathways and in between them was a lawn, speckled with older and larger trees. As we meandered through, Lee took her time to photograph the plants with her new camera as I looked for plants that I recognised. There were a few: ironbark, redgum, silver wattle, common heath, pigface, I made sure to let my team members know when I found one, thus was my enthusiasm for these plants. But there were so many that I did not recognise. Some felt familiar, but none felt quite right. That's when I began to realise that the plants here were not locally native, but from other parts of Australia. This partly alienated me, why were we studying a space without many of the plants we came to find? Furthermore, all the plants had been organised to meet Western sensibilities about what a garden ought to look like. The lawns were well watered and cut short, and the plants chosen for their aesthetic appeal or showiness, missing beautiful plants that might not be as remarcable on first glance.
I continued to wander, taking pictures of the plants I did and didn’t know, until I reached a space to the north of the main garden; a vast field of grasses with a few trees in the centre of a slight hill that rose in the middle. It made me feel things. Bitttersweet things.
On one hand it was a beautiful sight, reminding me of what Melbourne had looked like before Melbourne even existed. But then I came to remember what happened to the architects of these incredible landscapes. The Woiwurrung had made it that vast portions of the lowlands of Melbourne were fields, scattered with portions of seasonal bushland. They would use fire and the lay of the land to manage their resources; to keep kangaroos moving, plants growing and thriving and their mob fed.
I also recalled something I had read only the night before, about how after the corroboree spot at the Yarra Falls was captured by the colonisers and subsequently blown up to make sailing up the Birrarung possible, for decades representatives from the Kulin Nation would come to Royal Park to corroboree. Of course the wheels of imperialism would soon have this space too stolen.
The space reminded me of how many lives were lost; how much Traditional Knowledge, whole languages just wiped out. It reminded me that I wouldn’t be here also if colonialism never came, which made me feel almost sick to my stomach. Despite never being raised Aboriginal, I feel immense pain over it all.
Am I even allowed to feel such connection? Even though it's almost certain I have Yorta Yorta ancestry, a side-effect of my Great Grandmother’s alcoholism and infidelity, I wasn’t raised Indigenous, so who am I to identify with such an inconsequential thing as blood when culture is nurture and not nature?
Either way, the space, for all its beauty, left me feeling lost, which is why in an effort to find myself again I split all my thoughts out in this auto-ethnography.