I hear the slowing beat of the morning train pulling into Middle Footscray Station. Closing my front gate, I walk East along Buckley Street past a sea of immaculately renovated period homes. A wire fence surrounds what was once a row of houses but is now vacant land. Imprisoned behind the fence is a wilting community garden and a new billboard promising apartments with “industrial style, sustainable design”. Norma lived in a house on that lot for 80 years before it was acquired by the State. I wonder where Norma is now.
The click clack of heels mixes with the swish swoosh of suits moving in waves toward the station. A sea of iPhones, ear plugs and headphones … everyone simultaneously plugged in and tuned out. There is no eye contact. No talking. Cars snake back into the distant suburbs, gridlocked in what is the usual peak hour traffic. Drivers sit and stare blankly at the Trugo Club as it waits patiently for weekend visitors.
I move in the opposite direction to the masses, noticing another new construction shadowing a once-sunny street. Trees stretch their limbs to capture the few shards of sunlight peeking between the growing buildings. The historical façade of what was the Footscray Swim Centre stands awkwardly in front of a towering new development; a pitiful nod to the once thriving community displaced behind it. These streets are no longer home to wet-haired, thong-adorned types carrying wet bathers and towels in plastic bags. The corner site of the Belgravia Hotel, flattened long ago, now displays the promise of even more luxury apartments. Free Beer used to play here Tuesday nights. There is no more Free Beer.
The city skyline follows me, watching what I’m doing now that I am no longer part of its undulating blue wave of imaginings and promises. My belongings, and pride, packed into a cardboard box after ten years of bouncing between an office tower and my tiny period home two train stops away.
The gritty old warehouse grows larger as I approach it. Its rusty shell screams industrial decline. I see people mingling under a neon sign that reads “The Studios”. There are bean bags peppering the lawn and children playing in the park across the road. The warehouse is untouched on the outside; the carpark nothing but a plot of dirt. Unlike the façade of the swim centre, behind this is a culture created of nothing. The historical blue-collar residents are long gone. Those without a place, by choice or necessity, attempt to carve out a new way of being in this post-industrial graveyard. I wonder if the tempo of the machinery that once lived within this building is keeping time with the future it didn’t see coming. Promised within, is a place of reinvention. A place remade.
As I pay for my own small patch of this place, I wonder if this too will one day be transformed into apartments of “industrial style” and “sustainable design”. I realise that I am now a bricoleur in this tiny urban pocket of perpetual change. In remaking myself, I remake place. And it does the same to me.
Image: Tara Meinczinger on Unsplash