Landscapes of Our Hearts: Reconciling People and Environment

Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are advised that this publication contains the names and images of people who have died.

Contents

Chapter 1: The child’s tale

Chapter 2: How did we get here?

Chapter 3: The land itself

Chapter 4: Settlers

Chapter 5: Blackfella, whitefella

Chapter 6: At home in a strange land

Chapter 7: Mapping Country

Chapter 8: Water, life, love and death in a dry country

Chapter 9: The trees that shape the land

Chapter 10: Values, rules and knowledge

Chapter 11: Who do we think we are?

Acknowledgements

Notes

Index

CHAPTER 1

The child’s tale

The creek washed it,

the sun blessed it,

the dove sang it,

the song of the child yet to be born

Judith Wright, ‘A Song to Sing You’¹

I grew up in a rural English landscape where water was a dominant and ever-present feature. Across the meadow from our house in the village of Hadlow was the River Bourne, a minor tributary of the River Medway that divides the County of Kent and flows past verdant orchards and hop gardens before emptying into vast estuarine saltmarshes and merging with the murky waters of the River Thames at Sheerness. The Bourne has its source at the foot of the North Downs, a great ridge of chalk grassland along which runs the ancient Pilgrims’ Way, from Winchester in Hampshire to the shrine of St Thomas à Becket at Canterbury Cathedral, the greatest place of pilgrimage in mediaeval England.

Along the Bourne was a chain of water mills that provided the power for papermaking and flour milling, some since Saxon times. The still depths of their millponds were home to the ancient leviathan carp of my boy angler’s imagination. The paper mills hark back to the life and times of the 15th-century merchant, writer and printer William Caxton, born in Hadlow, who introduced the printing press to England and was the country’s earliest retail bookseller. The first book known to have been printed and sold by Caxton was an edition of William Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales.

I spent countless hours in the River Bourne, netting minnow or three-spined stickleback and turning over stones searching for caddis fly larvae, water beetles and their main predatory fish, the beautifully mottled, goggle-eyed bullhead. On one excursion I found a crude flint hand axe on the bed of the river. Its sharp edges rounded by aeons of flowing water, the axe had been struck from a larger core stone and was only half-finished, bearing the marks of where six large flakes had been removed. It fitted the contours of my hand perfectly. I knew immediately what it was, just from the feel and shape of the stone. Handling the axe for the first time sparked in me a heady mix of connection with place and imaginings of the past. The chalk of the North Downs had been cut through by meltwater rivers at the end of the last ice age twelve thousand years ago, exposing flint nodules that Mesolithic people used to make tools. The axe now sits on my desk, within easy reach, a reminder that the landscape of my childhood had been inhabited for millennia by successive waves of migrants and invaders, each with their own material culture, industry and influences on the environment.

Within a few miles of our house were Neolithic standing stones, the Bronze Age burial mound at Coldrum, the Iron Age Oldbury hill fort at Ightam, Celtic field boundaries and terraces cut into the chalky hillslopes, a Roman villa at Lullingstone and a scattering of Saxon castles and Norman churches. From our vegetable garden, my mother would sometimes dig shards of mediaeval pottery and very occasionally a tiny bronze Roman coin bearing the image of a foreign emperor. My country was filled with relicts, bygone stories and ancient pagan gods. The past and its people were all around. They were present in our speech: the dozens of English words with Latin roots that we spoke every day, together with borrowed words from Gaelic, Old Norse, Norman French, and German. Language and place are inextricably entwined. And as I learned about the history of everyday places, so they became more special and meaningful to me. Place, time, space and the constancy of change: geography and history merged into a seamlessness of belonging.

Much of the time I was alone, by choice, immersed in that flood-prone province of rivers and water meadows. I would walk from our house across to the Bourne and slide into its stream, over a shallow bed of flint cobbles, and wade to the deeper, muddy reaches lined with bulrush and weeping willow, the water filling my wellington boots. Near the village of Golden Green, the Bourne broadened and turned eastwards. A water mill had been on this spot since the time of the Domesday Book in the 11th century. Skirting the alluring but exposed millpond with its prominent ‘no fishing’ sign, I would cross the bridge at Victoria Lane and continue on down a long, straight section of river divided by a slim island of impenetrable hawthorn thicket. Along the main branch of the river, shoals of sleek but elusive chub patrolled endlessly. Beyond was the lower reach of the river, meandering across its floodplain of fertile but poorly drained farmland, and flowing on to its confluence with the Medway near the hamlet of Snoll Hatch with its terraced cottages faced with red Kentish hanging tiles.

My mother taught me the rudiments of field botany, giving me a practical grounding in which plants had edible fruit, and when they were ripe, and which berries and mushrooms were poisonous. Later, as I learned to recognise the plants, especially those of wet places, I discovered how their common names served as vivid mnemonics of their identity: purple loosestrife, yellow flag, marsh horsetail, toadflax, hemp agrimony. These were names of imagination, embedded in folklore and everyday observation. My regular reading included my mother’s well-thumbed copy of The Reverend William Keble Martin’s masterpiece The Concise British Flora in Colour, which I still own, along with her copy of Sir John Hill’s The Family Herbal, published in 1812. I learned that many familiar plants were not native to England but had been introduced before 1500, either accidentally or because of their value as foods or medicines, and had become naturalised.²

I came to understand that each wave of human invaders had modified this landscape by introducing new plants and animals, clearing the extensive woodlands for cropping and grazing and developing new industries based around water, wood and rock: charcoal burning, iron working, timber production, papermaking.³ The woodlands of Kent were managed by coppicing to provide a sustainable source of wood for charcoal to fuel the iron furnaces, and for fencing, poles and building materials. The copses, or coppiced woodlands, of my childhood were common and easy to recognise from the multi-stemmed trees formed by the age-old cycle of harvesting the young stems and their resprouting from the cut stumps.

Fishing was an early obsession of mine, and I bicycled down sunken footpaths and forgotten trackways hedged by blackthorn and ash, searching for secluded ponds and lakes rarely visited by other anglers. I picked out these promising spots from the much-consulted Ordnance Survey map pinned to our kitchen wall. Many places were on private land, and I trespassed my way shamelessly across the Weald of Kent. I taught myself to observe, be vigilant and become near-invisible in the landscape. On full alert for an irate landholder, my every sense was heightened. The unmistakable, pungent smell of fresh water mixed with mud and decaying vegetation is one of my most abiding memories of childhood.

When I was old enough to apply for a shotgun licence, I bought a cheap but reliable single-barrel Spanish hammerlock and roamed the woods and riverbanks rough shooting for wood pigeon, rabbit, hare and grey squirrel. I hunted all year round, but early winter was my favourite season for its stark beauty and stillness; the landscape transformed by frost and ice. Trees were bare of leaves and the watercolour palette of autumn tones had given way to a country of deep browns, greys and silvery white. Big turbulent skies and thin biting air threatened snow. Only hardy people ventured out of doors: tough inveterate walkers who knew the austere pleasure of being outside at that time of year; and farmers too, for some essential task of maintenance or the management of livestock. Rabbits were scarce but pigeons were still to be found, often in small flocks feeding on the turnip and sugar beet that were grown for cattle feed.

Shooting was for the table and pest control rather than for sport. My frugal mother, endlessly imaginative in ways to make ends meet for her family of six, grew much of our fruit and vegetables. Pigeons and rabbits made short work of a row of young peas or radish. I remember her early one morning leaning out of the landing window in her dressing gown with a look of steely determination on her face and my shotgun at her shoulder, having just dispatched with a single shot two fat wood pigeons that had raided her cabbages.

Our garden fare and game were supplemented by gathering from the hedgerows on long, often cold and rainy family walks. Rosehips, sloes, elderflower, blackberries, crab apples and damsons were transformed into wines, cordials, jams and pies. The plants and animals of the English countryside were a regular part of our diet long before the Wild Food movement became fashionable. For us, like generations before us, the hedgerows, woods and fields provided food for free, which was very much a part of what linked us to our landscape. When I recall those walks, down footpaths and damp lanes, I think of the oak, ash and thorn of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘A Tree Song’. That ancient land with its sacred trees and myths and nature gods is the land that I walk in my memory of childhood.

Half a century on, and half a world away, a new river has become part of my life. Ginninderra Creek is a scruffy little stream that rises on the northern border of the Australian Capital Territory, flows over a dam and down a spillway from an artificial lake, Lake Ginninderra, and on through Canberra’s north-western suburbs of Evatt, Melba, Flynn, Latham, Macgregor and Dunlop. The cycle path east from Melba along the creek towards the lake is popular with dog walkers. Occasionally the dog and I veer west, heading for Umbagong District Park, where axe-grinding grooves in the volcanic rock of the creek bed are a reminder of the first inhabitants of this region. Umbagong is one of over three thousand Aboriginal sites in Canberra. Scatterings of stone artefacts have been found on Black Mountain, Mount Ainslie and Mount Majura. These hills were vantage points and remain sites of cultural and spiritual significance for local Ngunnawal and Ngambri peoples. The site of the National Museum on Acton Peninsula was once part of a complex of ceremonial grounds extending across the floodplain of the Molonglo River, now partly submerged by Lake Burley Griffin.

Some of the plants along Ginninderra Creek I know from my Kentish childhood, though here most are regarded as weeds. Weeping willow is ubiquitous, as is ash, hawthorn, plum, blackberry, ivy, privet and poplar. Cumbungi or bulrush Typha domingensis, familiar in form though a different species from the English one, chokes the channel in many places, partnered with common reed Phragmites australis, with its feathery flowering heads. Flattened by regular flooding and dying off in winter, the reeds readily resprout and recover, trapping silt and raising the riverbed. The reeds and cumbungi have slowly expanded their range during the fourteen years we have lived in Melba, winning out against the alternating flow of the stream through flood and drought. In summer the dorsal fins of European carp break the surface of the drying pools. This fish that I so avidly sought out in the lakes and rivers of Kent is vilified as an introduced pest here, though an increasing number of anglers now fish for it. In England, European carp is also an introduced species, transplanted from eastern Europe where it had been farmed since Roman times, and spreading from ponds of mediaeval monasteries where fish substituted for meat on Fridays.

White poplar Populus alba, a deciduous native tree of Europe and central Asia, is becoming an environmental weed along Ginninderra Creek.⁴ Like willows, poplars have long been a valued source of medicine in Europe; their leaves and bark have antiseptic properties and are rich in salicylic acid and vitamin C. Mature trees form dense woodlands along those reaches of the creek that flow through Evatt and Latham, their understorey permeated by the same smell of water, mud and decaying vegetation I remember from childhood. The poplars were first planted when the suburbs were marked out with surveyor’s pegs in the early 1970s. The regular rows and generous spacing afforded to the young saplings have given way over time to crowded ranks of large mature trees. Beyond the boundary of this woody grid, younger generations have thicketed from suckers and seeds. The white poplar trees are gradually being removed because of their tendency to spread and crowd out native species. Their prodigious water uptake risks altering the water balance of the river valley. A couple of years ago, a crew from Territory and Municipal Services cut down the clump by Copland Drive Bridge and planted casuarina and grevillea in their place, but tenacious young poplar shoots have sprouted back. In autumn the falling leaves decay rapidly and are said to enrich the creek waters with an excess of nutrients that cause harm to aquatic life. I wonder whether there was much aquatic life in the creek left after it was dammed upstream to form Lake Ginninderra when the new suburbs were first built. But the white poplar are probably here to stay – there are almost too many of them to remove – and eventually they will become a naturalised part of the riparian landscape of Ginninderra Creek.

How and when will naturalisation occur? What does naturalised even mean? Ecologists define it as an introduced plant or animal that has become self-sustaining in its new environment. People have moved plants and animals to new landscapes, intentionally and by accident, for millennia. Some, like European carp, have been vilified as their negative effects on the environment have become apparent. Others seem to do no obvious damage, yet are maligned for their exotic status. Is naturalisation just a matter of ecological spread over time or does it imply a collective social change in viewpoint from enmity to acceptance? Is it any different from somebody saying ‘I was not born here, but I have lived here long enough that I feel this is where I belong’? The word ‘naturalised’ seems as enigmatic now as it did when I first came across it as a child in Keble Martin’s Concise British Flora.

Dotted along the creek are clusters of rectangular plastic sheeting held in place by bamboo stakes, marking where native trees have been planted by local schoolchildren and members of the North Belconnen Landcare Group. A dedicated band of volunteers have devoted their time to caring for areas of heritage-listed native grasslands, clearing weeds and restoring the riverbanks. My former CSIRO colleague Ken Hodgkinson has spent years researching different ways of burning and mowing to encourage the diversity of native grassland plants along the creek, including rare lilies and orchids. The North Belconnen volunteers are just one of some thirty-six Landcare groups now operating in the Australian Capital Territory, up from thirteen in 1991. What started as a small grassroots community movement has evolved and grown to become an established part of Canberra’s social and cultural life, working in sophisticated and successful partnership with the ACT Government, local businesses and researchers from CSIRO and the universities to care for the environment.⁵

The community volunteering effort shows how important the local environment is to many city dwellers. The green spaces within the suburbs of Canberra are treated as equally significant as the grasslands by the volunteers, even though these places have been greatly altered from their natural states by development and the introduction of exotic plants. These novel ecosystems have been transformed from their original state by human agency, but have become accepted and valued for what they are, not what they once were.⁶

New wetlands in Canberra have been built by the ACT Government to store, filter and recycle water to irrigate playing fields, supply habitat for aquatic plants, waterbirds, reptiles and fishes, as well as create new recreational, volunteering and educational opportunities. The ecosystem services derived from these constructed wetlands, along Sullivans Creek catchment in O’Connor, Dickson and Lyneham and on Ginninderra Creek in Gungahlin, clearly benefit the community. These places are immensely popular with local residents for the amenity and aesthetic values they provide. Before Canberra was built, Sullivans Creek and its tributaries were chains of ponds, often isolated from each other during dry periods, and interspersed with narrow, perched floodplains and rocky gullies. These wetlands were never intended to restore the creeks to their natural condition, but are an imaginative and exciting way of enriching and varying the cityscape. By creating a series of planted ponds linked by a corridor of water and vegetation, they form a pathway for exploration through suburban blandness.

Heading westwards along Ginninderra Creek from our house, I come to Flynn and Charnwood, historically tough working-class enclaves of government rental housing. Now these suburbs are fast becoming gentrified as ex-government houses are renovated by first-time home owners searching for a bargain on the city’s outskirts. In 2005, on my first walk along Ginninderra Creek through Flynn, I came across something that made my heart sing. Hanging among a dense patch of wild cherry trees was a battered glass wind chime, marking the neat entrance to a tunnel-like cubby house of carefully interwoven leafy branches decorated with strips of coloured ribbon. The floor had been furnished with a strip of worn pink carpet on which was laid out an old glass lemonade bottle and two plastic beakers salvaged from the piles of flood debris by the creek. The children who made this place special were rich beyond measure in imagination and innocent joy for the secret camp they had created on this shabby piece of waste ground. I turned for home and the sudden sound of the wind chime in the freshening breeze jolted my tears for the memory of childhood.

Children connect with nature and imagination even in the most unsightly of urban locations. Historian Graeme Davison grew up in the Melbourne suburb of Essendon in the 1950s and would often play in run-down Lincoln Park among overgrown grass, broken bottles and vandalised swings and seesaws. But the park ‘had once been a beautiful and sacred place. Its light sandy soil – a feature of the district – had nourished tall red gums and bracken undergrowth, a source of fruit and game for the Aborigines who met there for play and ceremony.’ In his thoughtful, evocative essay ‘City Dreaming’, Davison reminds us that re-reading our landscapes for evidence of their deep history includes re-interpreting our cityscapes: ‘The cities were meeting places for Aborigines long before Europeans made them prime real estate.’ Davison’s essay is subtitled ‘Making Peace with Belonging’. Today, Lincoln Park has been rejuvenated with a modern playground, bark chips and picnic tables and is the venue for the monthly North Essendon Farmers’ Market.⁷

Beyond Flynn and Charnwood, Ginninderra Creek flows westwards past what is, for now at least, the last outer suburb and then through paddocks peppered with sheep dung to Ginninderra Falls, where water plummets more than forty metres into a great pool in a rocky gorge before flowing on to merge with the Murrumbidgee River. When my sons, Ewan and Angus, were young boys, we would come here occasionally to swim during achingly hot summer days. We sat in the creek above the falls with our legs blissfully outstretched, backs to the current, our hands splayed on the smooth rock to brace ourselves against the flow. The afternoon sun fell on the uplifted brown faces of my water-loving boys. Just above the steep rocky edge of the plunge pool was a narrow path leading downstream. On one airless day we found a dead brown snake on the rocks, not yet flyblown; its belly scales were broad and yellowish, outlined and speckled with patches of red ochre. Ewan, with a mixture of fascination and dread, prodded at the corpse with a stick. From then on he kept a careful eye out for snakes when near water, vigilance that paid off years later when he and his teenage mates headed out to the falls for a swim on a baking December day. Ewan spotted a brown snake, this one very much alive, and alerted the swimmers. He told me, ‘I reckon I could probably outrun a brown, but I could never outswim one.’

The Cotter River Reserve, known ironically by locals as ‘Canberra Beach’, and Uriarra Crossing on the Murrumbidgee River were favourite swimming spots too, especially when we first came to Canberra from the frigid grey west coast of Scotland. Here, in the bright sunlight, the boys found the company of children their own age and learned the social rules of their new land. As they mixed with other kids, their broad Glaswegian accents and vocabulary were rapidly displaced by the colloquialisms and drawling vowels of their schoolmates. My sons relished the freedom to play and explore at those special wild places on the edge of suburbia, but they also loved Weston Park on the shores of Lake Burley Griffin and the grounds of Civic Pool with its shady walnut trees, close to the heart of the city. They made no great distinction between town and bush. For children, each place they make their own has a special set of attractions, both physical and created from the imagination of play.

But there were other special places too, further away and a lot wilder, where we would go to camp with friends during the Easter and Christmas holidays. One such place was the Snowy River. A two-hour drive south from Canberra took us to Jindabyne, where we turned off the tarmac onto the winding, precarious Barry Way. The unsealed road drops precipitously through rugged montane forest down to the river valley and then on to the Victorian border and Gippsland. We would head down the valley to the campsite at Pinch River and meet up with other Canberra families, pitch our tents, rig up tarpaulins over the communal kitchen and get a fire going. The mob of kids would head straight for the water. The Snowy is a fast-flowing alpine river and can be ferociously cold even in summer. Angus would stay in the water until his lips turned blue and I would have to drag him out, throw a towel around him and stand him, shivering, in front of the fire.

Ewan and his mate Blaine were older than most of the other kids and looked out for them, making sure that nobody wandered out of sight or did anything too dangerous. Ewan told me, ‘We felt tough and responsible because we both owned pocket knives. We kept an eye out for the other kids, but we were a social group, a gang.’ Ewan’s love of the outdoors, learned as a child, has endured into adulthood. He often heads off with his mates or his partner to one of the national parks on the south coast to camp and fish. ‘The Snowy was where I learned my camping skills,’ he says. ‘You don’t try and make sense of why you love the environment when you are a kid. You just do.’

It is April 2016. I am standing with my partner, Alison, and a group of friends on the beach at Trial Bay looking out across the flat calm of the sea to the mountains in the distance. We have rented holiday houses at South West Rocks on the central coast of New South Wales for the past several Easters. Before that, we used to go camping in a great unruly horde, but we adults are now in our late fifties and early sixties and our kids have grown up and mostly left home. Comfortable accommodation has a lot to recommend it at our time of life. To our right is the campsite overlooked by the ruins of Trial Bay Gaol. I enjoy walking slowly, inconspicuously, through the campsite to observe and compare the ingenious configurations of tentage that house the larger groups of families and friends. At one spot, a great Bedouin tent of silver tarpaulin supported by a forest of poles stretches over a ringed encampment of smaller tents, outdoor tables and chairs, a bar fridge and a television. A pile of bicycles of all sizes is stacked neatly nearby. This encampment could easily accommodate thirty people and looks almost semi-permanent, which in a sense it is. The people who inhabit it re-erect and re-model it at the same place each time they come here. All over Australia in the camping grounds of the coast and the inland, people come together at this time of year to enjoy the outdoors and have a holiday that is strongly orientated towards their children. It is an important form of ceremony, coinciding with the Easter holidays.

It is perhaps too much of a stretch to assume that just being in the environment imbues each generation of campers with a sense of place and a respect for nature. Many may come simply for the beach and the sea, for the conviviality and relaxation of an affordable holiday with family and friends. But it is a start. Author Tim Winton wrote of this Australian affinity with the outdoors as ‘a filial dance with landscape’ that is part of our physical culture and ‘speaks of an implicit collective understanding that the land is still present in the corner of our eye, still out there, but also carried within, as a genetic connection’.⁸

The city and the country merge in Canberra. From the vantage point of Mount Rogers, another favourite dog-walking haunt, Alison and I scan across the suburbs to the south and east and see the traces of streets partially obscured by trees and a multi-coloured archipelago of rooftops among a sea of green. The overwhelming impression is of a vast open forest, the woodlands of suburbia.

Mount Rogers Reserve is an in-between place, neither urban park kept neat with lawnmowers, bark chippings and municipal by-laws, nor national park with its unspoilt beauty and rules for the protection of biodiversity. For kids, the reserve is a natural extension of their backyards. The slopes are studded with grand old Blakely’s red gums interspersed with younger trees planted by the Mount Rogers Landcare Group. At one spot a clump of straggly snow gums seems to emerge straight out of the rock. Here and there are the stumps of great trees, felled after European settlement at a time when the landscape was still open grassy woodland. Fixed to a lichen-encrusted boulder near the summit, a small brass plaque commemorates a much-loved companion: ‘Scoobie, 2007, RIP’. We come across this simple, moving tribute on a winter’s day of frost and sharp sunlight. Our own dog, Ellie, a black-and-white hound of uncertain parentage, so in-the-moment and alive, is oblivious to our momentary stillness as she sniffs the frozen grass for the scent of kangaroos. She regards the ’roos with circumspection and keeps her distance, only half-heartedly giving chase after they have turned away from their brief stand-off.

We descend on a narrow path from the summit. A gaunt elderly man wearing a faded pink beanie approaches and stops to say g’day. There is a pronounced tremor in his hand as he holds his stick. His dog, a shaggy Airedale cross, rockets out of the bush and chases Ellie up the slope. The man smiles with affection at the Airedale’s playful triumph over the larger dog. We relax into conversation: the attributes of our animals, the beauty of the day and the simple pleasure of being in this place. The commonplace mateship of dog walkers.

The sun burns off the layer of low mist around Black Mountain and Mount Ainslie. In the distance are the snow-covered Brindabella Hills, their peaks like ancient ancestors looking down benevolently on Canberra. Our City Dreaming.

The natural places in which we learn about our environment as we are growing up have been called primal landscapes.⁹ These landscapes of childhood contain and integrate the elements of the natural world – its structure, physical appearance, plants and animals – with its human dimensions: society, culture, family and economy. Learning to belong in these primal landscapes is to come to know and feel the relatedness of these elements and their significance to our identity. In Island Home: a Landscape Memoir, Tim Winton wrote of experiencing his childhood landscapes: ‘Being short and powerless, kids see the world low down and close up. On hands and knees, on their naked bellies, they feel it with an immediacy we can scarcely recall as adults.’ Winton describes how children explore and observe: ‘weaving a tapestry of arcane lore … that didn’t just make the world more comprehensible, but rendered it intimate, even sacred’.¹⁰

As children, we feel and sense as part of our learning. Being in nature as a child is to be immersed in a living encyclopaedia, with plants, animals, water, sand, rocks and sky instead of words. As we grow older, we unwittingly separate the visceral, sensate experience of learning and being in a landscape from the intellectual and the abstract. The landscape of our childhood might be a city park, an adventure playground with a creek and grand old trees or a coastline with lagoons, estuaries and melaleuca forest. Geography and ecology do not constrain the creativity of children. They will make a story and a game in any place out of whatever is at hand. What matters is that special places are accessible and visited over and over so they become familiar and have meaning.

I am from the country, born and brought up, but have lived in cities since my early twenties. In each place, I have found elements of the landscape that have deep significance to me. In both country and city, the landscapes of my heart were heavily modified by human influences throughout millennia. The contemporary urban landscapes of my adulthood, and those of my children’s childhoods, are layered, enriched and synergised with connections, history and meaning from what has gone before. Graeme Davison summed up this idea: ‘the river valley and the square: they are different, but complementary, facets of an authentic contemporary Australian urbanism. Without the first, our lives are too shallow; without the second they lack purpose. Together they may just possibly allow us to be at home.’¹¹

In my home city of Canberra, that influence continues by the minute as new suburbs spring up to satisfy the seemingly never-ending demand for housing in this rapidly expanding capital. The new suburbs lack the street trees of the old. Roads are narrower, gardens smaller. Green spaces are fewer and more centralised. Unlike in the older suburbs, there is no network of laneways and paths winding around the backs of the houses, connecting streets and communities and forming shortcuts to the nearest shops. In the minds of the developers, pedestrians no longer exist.

Will the generations of children that come to