Newell’s Renewal

CHRIS HATZIS 
Eavesdrop on Experts, a podcast about 21st Century explorers changing the world, one lecture, one experiment, one interview at a time. I'm Chris Hatzis.

It's a bonus edition of Eavesdrop on Experts today. In our last episode we eavesdropped on the University of Melbourne's Dr Seona Candy about the essential global movement of our cities becoming resilient ecocities.

Today Eavesdrop on Experts production assistant Claudia Hooper grabs the microphone and travels down to Newells Paddock in Melbourne to capture a major shrub planting project that shows what communities working together can do to improve the urban environment. Let's piggyback on her big adventure.

CLAUDIA HOOPER 
I've come on a meandering and interesting journey down to Footscray's Newells Paddock in Melbourne's inner western suburbs. In amongst the industrial murmur and whir, it's an oddly serene location. Trains pass by as ibis, cormorants and coots frolic in the water of the recently restored wetlands.

I'm here to join Friends of Newells Paddock and the Ecocity World Summit speakers who are planting shrubs and continuing the process of regeneration. It's also a great opportunity to speak with residents, councillors, and rangers about the complicated and controversial history of the site.

So I'm just talking to Dominique Hes, who's an academic at the University of Melbourne and also a presenter at the Ecocity conference. Dominique, what are we doing out here today in Footscray, in Newells Paddock?

DOMINIQUE HES
So we are planting trees and shrubs and ground covers to support the local ecosystems of the area. We’re doing that as part of - instead of getting a bottle of wine or a book or something, as part of Ecocities, instead we're getting a plant so that we are actually contributing to the local area.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
How's it been getting your hands dirty, have you enjoyed the process?

DOMINIQUE HES
It's been a bit cold, the ground's a bit hard. But it's actually, I love getting my hands dirty, although I have gloves on.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
Can you give me an idea of how many shrubs we're planting today?

DOMINIQUE HES
Five hundred I think. There is a whole gaggle of school children coming soon, and they're going to help us do some of the planting. Because obviously many of the speakers are from international places, from overseas, so they can't be here to help us plant. So we've co-opted a bunch of students, about 50 of them, to come and help us. So we're just waiting for them to arrive and they can do most of the work. [Laughs]

CLAUDIA HOOPER
Out here accompanying the students are some speakers of the July 2017 Ecocity World Summit. They're planting trees instead of giving gifts to the speakers. Much more fun, much more environmentally friendly, and with a legacy. Can you tell us a bit about how long you’ve been living in the area and the kind of things that you’ve noticed changing over that time?

MALE
Yeah, look, I moved into West Footscray back in 2009, so it's just over eight years ago now. How it's changed, well, there's been lots of changes in Footscray. I mean it's definitely building up from a density point of view. But this area here is quite special to us, because the Temple - which is just over the other side of the railway behind us - is a place that we often ride our bikes and come around this area. So we'll ride around, even all the way up the Maribyrnong there.

This area definitely is improving. I think this is a really great idea from the Ecocity conference, which I'm speaking at, to have us come and do this rather than get a token bottle of wine, or a bottle of shampoo or soaps or other kind of junk. So yeah, I think this is a really neat effort.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
How have you found being out here today planting - is this your daughter with you here?

MALE
Yeah, I've got Princess [Gyani] with me here today, and she's been excellent with the little white tabs of - I don’t even know what they are, but the stuff that goes at the bottom of the plants, she's been great with that. Yeah, look, I'm mean we've seen there's probably, I don’t know, maybe there's 50 or 100 plants that have been done here today already. So it's been good.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
Every resident has their own recollection of this area, with each remembering distinctly different parts of the site's history.

FEMALE
When I came here I mean there were virtually no birds around. I mean it's really interesting. It wasn’t until about in the '90s there was some work done by Melbourne Water and they - Jill Orr-Young was a landscape architect, and she actually did a design for this, and that's when they recreated the wetlands and did a lot of the planting. Over the next 25-odd years very little was done. Then after that I suppose it was just - you couldn’t walk through. I'd be walking with my dog along the river and not realising - well, at the time you couldn’t walk through because it was a conservation area.

But then all of a sudden you could walk through, and then about three years ago - two-and-a-half, three years ago - Friends of Newells Paddock was established. Yvonne Bischofberger, she was the basic person. She was instrumental in getting it all up and running. We just started doing some planting and today you wouldn’t recognise the place.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
It's a big day for the kids being out here, but it's also great for the teachers to be able to give their students some hands-on experience.

MALE
Initially the park didn’t really have much going on, it was sort of left to itself. I mean I've been in Footscray for 20 years-odd, and around this area for a good 15 years. But ever since the creation of Newells Paddock - Friends of Newells Paddock - it's seen really great things happen. We've seen lots and lots of endemic trees planted, and grasses. It's sort of been restored back to its natural state.

But I mean the park itself is such an interesting history. It is one of the sites where Faulkner first encountered the Wurundjeri people. It was actually one of the proposed sites for Melbourne, but one of the party got lost on the other side of the river and they had to swim across and get him. Then after that it was owned by a few local contractors, and the person who actually owns my house owned the property.

When in the 1900s it was a site of big local controversy, because the contractor dumped all of Footscray's night soil down in this paddock. I think three people got typhoid and died. So the park wasn’t seen that favourably for a while. Then after that it was - William Angliss ran his operation for a long time, up until about the '40s.

But yeah, fascinating history. Realistically not many places around Melbourne have this sort of working wetlands actually right in the middle of the city. There aren't too many examples. It's a very unique ecosystem around here, the Western Plains. The grasslands extended all the way from here to sort of Werribee area, and they're one of the most endangered ecosystems in Australia. So it'd be great to see that rejuvenated and rehabilitated. But yeah, hopefully be able to do more of that.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
In the middle of rapid development in this area it's the determination, hard work and passion of local residents that sees initiatives like this native shrub planting happen.

So I was just wondering if you could tell me a bit about this area, what it used to be like, your memories from this place.

FEMALE
When I first started down here we only had two ponds - two ponds originally. So this area where we're working in today was created later on. Originally it was just dirt bikes and that, that went around here. They used this for running around. Originally when I first started you could stand at the carpark and look right to the other end of the park, so it was pretty bare and that.

So when they put the new railway in and that, they had to do, what is it, a culvert linking this to the Heavenly Queen site. That's when they put the ponds in. So I think that must have been a Melbourne Water project or something.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
So can you tell me a bit about what we’re doing here today?

FEMALE
We’re trying to increase the plant cover, probably to reduce the use of herbicide for one, and just to beautify the whole area and put the saltbush that was originally back into the area. Stop all the soil erosion, increase birdlife, increase the habitat of all the little foxes I suppose. There's foxes here, but not as many anymore. But yeah, just to create a bird corridor mainly.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
Can you tell us about some of the local birds that you get here? I think I saw a cormorant before, but I'm...

FEMALE
Yeah.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
…not sure.

FEMALE
I'm not quite good on the birds. We've had hawks and that, we used to come down here and watch the hawk all the time. You can see him hover, and then it's boom, straight down. Swans, we've had swans. We've had a family of swans over the years, and their signets. Every year they would breed. During the drought they stopped breeding, so that was it. That was when the ponds were actually empty, the ponds down here.

I think a lot of the residents just thought, oh, can't we fill it from the river? But you actually can't. You're not supposed to. So the actual flow comes from the houses. So all the water comes from the drainage through the first pond and the reeds, and by the time it filters through it should be a lot healthier water system.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
Hello there, how are you going?

GIRL
I'm good thanks.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
Are you enjoying being out here today planting?

GIRL
Yes yes.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
And how many have you planted so far?

GIRL
I think that's my fifth.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
I think that's a record!

GIRL
Thank you.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
The kids are involved in every step of the shrub planting process. The Maribyrnong City Council are keeping a watchful eye on them and explaining what to do, how to do it, and why it is important.

MALE
We've got our water crystal. So this is a wetting agent, so in the summer it'll have some moisture to draw from. So it'll be guaranteed some moisture in that dry period. Okay, so a little bit of [dryline unclear] wetting agent and the fertilising tablet.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
I can see quite a lot of different things that the students out here are planting. Can you give me an idea of what some of these species are, how they're going to grow, and how they benefit the wetland?

MALE
Well, they're all low shrubs and ground covers and bushes that would have occurred here naturally, before European settlement. The one right in front of us - this sort of strappy one - is, it's Lomandra longifolia. It's one of the plants that used to get called things like Cockies bootlaces, because it has these long strappy leaves that you can use as fibre. The original people used to make baskets out of it. That gets to a nice tussocky thing about knee height.

Most people would know it, even if they didn’t think they do, because they're very popular for planting along freeways. It's a really reliable green little thing that forms a dense cover, ideal for little birds and lizards to hide in this patch. Because as it is at the moment, this is just bare ground - there's no cover, there's no shelter, there's no food sources, that spiny mat rush is its common name, provides some of that.

Other plans we've got here. I can see that there is Einadia nutans which is ruby saltbush, and that's more of a flat groundcover type bush. It's called saltbush because, well, it's a bit salt tolerant to their being salt in the ground, but also the leaves taste slightly salty. But it has nice little red berries on it which you can eat. That’s obviously bird food. It's a great thing, I really like it because it forms a dense ground covering mat that helps suppress, as we say, weeds coming up. So it's a real ripper, it covers all the ground.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
What's this more leafy one over there that we can see?

MALE
Oh, that is Hop goodenia, and that is a bit of a higher bush. Goodenia ovata, Hop goodenia. I presume it's called Hop goodenia because it’s probably one of various plants that the early settlers used to use the leaves to help brew beer with. Or it looks like hops, I'm not sure. Anyway, really nice bush, quite dense thing up to about chest height that gets covered with yellow flowers.

Again a beautiful habitat plant because it's nice and dense, and it's covered with all these flowers that are a source of nectar and so on for insects, which are then food for birds. So it's a beautiful thing, and I like it being planted here too because it will be visible from the train. It'll be nice, especially when it's covered with its yellow flowers.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
Students from the local Footscray City College have put up their hands to dig, plant, water, and protect the environment. We have a chat with a few keen Year 7s who have been studying water systems and are getting some hands-on experience.

So are you guys enjoying being out here planting? Is it better than being in the classroom, being able to come down here and do some gardening?

STUDENT
Definitely, yeah, for sure.

STUDENT
Yes.

STUDENT
Because I mean it's our work out as well, it's really fun.

STUDENT
Yeah, get some guns.

STUDENT
Yeah.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
How do you feel about being involved in a project like this where these plants are going to be here for the next 10, 20, 30 years? You're creating this place, how does that make you feel?

STUDENT
Really good. I've never really had the chance gardening and planting. So yeah, it's really nice.

STUDENT
Same thing.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
So have you been enjoying learning about waterways? Is this a better way to do it, outside of the classroom?

STUDENT
Yes.

STUDENT
Yeah, I…

STUDENT
Definitely.

STUDENT
Yeah, it shows in real life and stuff. I've learnt so much about water during this term and all that. It just brings it to real life I guess, just doing it outside.

STUDENT
It’s like you're in a classroom for hours just searching everything up. But you can just go outside and see it yourself.

STUDENT
This is a fun way of doing it, yeah.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
So how many rocks do you reckon you’ve hit? I can hear another one there.

STUDENT
Yeah, there's a rock. It was fully covered over there, it was - yeah, so we're just looking around to find if we can find different places to plant it because all the rocks here don’t look natural, they all look man made.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
So are you enjoying being in the rejuvenating process in this area, do you like being out here today…

STUDENT
Yeah.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
…knowing that what you're doing out here is going to be here for a long time now?

STUDENT
Yeah, because I had - my teacher told me at the Footscray Park there's this guy that planted this tree when he was 15. He wasn’t there to see it grow, but now it's all massive. So it's good to think that might happen to things that we plant one day, yeah.

CLAUDIA HOOPER
It's been a wonderful day down here at Newells Paddock. Although we're only about six kilometres from the Melbourne CBD, the air is cleaner and the atmosphere is calm. It's been fascinating to hear about the history of this part of Wurundjeri land, from its use as a night soil dump to its more recent past as an industrial site.

With the fantastic work of Friends of Newells Paddock, the Ecocity World Summit, City of Maribyrnong, and of course the army of Year 7s, I look forward to revisiting in the coming years to see how much it has evolved and to see how the kids from Footscray City College have helped turn this former industrial eyesore into a beautiful urban green space where people can connect with native flora and fauna.

CHRIS HATZIS
Nice work. Thanks to our reporter Claudia Hooper, and all the shrub planters from the Footscray City College. No doubt the future residents who live near Newells Paddock will thank these junior green thumbs that they’ll be able to enjoy the beautiful natural environment that they helped to rejuvenate. Thanks also to Belinda Young from the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute at the University of Melbourne.

This Eavesdrop on Experts bonus episode was made possible by the University of Melbourne. Recorded on 28 June 2017. Co-production by Dr Andi Horvath and Claudia Hooper. Audio engineering and editing by me, Chris Hatzis.

Join us again next time for another Eavesdrop on Experts.