A cry in the night
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Margaret Simons
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Margaret Simons' biography and other articles by this writer
It was a cry of many voices. It sounded like anger, or lament. It was past eleven o'clock on the night of November 28, 2007 and I was in my study, tucked into the roof of my house, preparing to close down my computer and my mind. I looked out of the window. The noise had come from down the hill. It had been a hot day – more than thirty degrees – and night had fallen like a warm sheet. The golden arches of the McDonald's had only just been switched off, but the public housing flats still seemed to glow in the heat left by the western sun. Bright lights are mounted above these blocks and the white squares of windows in concrete walls make wakefulness a public thing, visible across the suburb. As I prepared for bed, it was clear that people were still up, trying to rid their flats of heat. Over there, night never really arrives. Nothing happens that is not illuminated.
Then the wail of many voices stopped, replaced by a single voice shouting. Then that stopped too. It was possible to believe – and, sleepy as I was, I did choose to believe this – that what I had heard were sounds made by friends leaving one of the fast food restaurants on Racecourse Road, or the normal noisy acts of self-assertion of the crowd from our award-winning Irish-themed pub – ironically called The Quiet Man.
I turned the computer off, went down the stairs and cleaned my teeth. Now there was only the hum that you always get from cities: not only traffic, not only voices but the beat of thousands of people living next to each other. I barely registered my reflection in the bathroom mirror. I went to bed.
The next morning, I found out what had happened – or at least a version of events. The cry in the night had made the radio news and the national newspapers.
I LIVE IN FLEMINGTON, and like my neighbourhood and its routines. I particularly like the way the weather sweeps across Melbourne's western suburbs, over Port Philip Bay and across the giant cranes on the docks, to reach us here between city and the famous racecourse which, for one day in November, makes our suburb the centre of national attention. The rest of the time, things are usually mundane. In the morning there is the clatter of kids going to school. Commuting cyclists speed along the stormwater drain – once a creek. They use it as a raceway into the city. At the southern end, it runs under the giant red and yellows posts that mark the end of the Tullamarine Freeway – the triumphant gateway to the City of Melbourne. Down here under the road bridges, where the red posts are anchored, they are tangled with debris like hair caught in the bristles of a hairbrush. This is the sort of close-up perspective you get when you know a place – when it is home.
Most mornings, the bus from Wesley College – one of Melbourne's most prestigious private schools – curves through the suburb, picking up kids in purple blazers. Old Italian men come out when the light is still soft to water the crops that grow in their front yards. The life of the main street begins – buying, selling, delivering, displaying and carrying away. Four-wheel drives squeeze into the permit-only parking spaces. The real estate agents drop bait advertising into letterboxes. If we sold, how much money we'd make. So much money! The street trees are dropping their leaves out of season because of the drought. A queue snakes out of the post office. The heroic clerks – Filipino, Vietnamese and Italian – deal with the mail of many small businesses, process banking, sell stationery and mobile phone plans, and help those with insufficient English negotiate the myriad bureaucracies for which they are the human face.
Down at the public housing estate, the owners of plots in the council-funded community garden gather for a delivery of mushroom compost. The garden was featured on Australia's Best Backyards a while ago. It doesn't look quite as glossy or cheerful as it did on television, but it is still a place of hope – a practical symbol of the possibility of growth. ‘I come here to escape the towers of hell,' says Angie, an Anglo-Australian, nodding at the flats. Two Turkish women in headscarves are giving away armloads of lettuce and silver-beet. Their plots, about the size of a single bed, yield more than they can eat now their children have moved to the suburbs. Coral, an Aboriginal woman, says she will point the bone at white people, and laughs when they believe her. ‘I am the matriarch,' she tells her grandchildren. When they ask her what that means, she tells them to look it up in the dictionary. Angie is growing the leaf crop amaranth, which some people think is a weed. It tends to wander over the plot of her neighbour, an African woman. But the African woman is growing pumpkins, and they also tumble over boundaries. ‘It doesn't bother her. ‘It doesn't bother me,' says Angie. ‘Live and let live.' In these gardens the female scarecrows wear hijab, and the male scarecrows have beards. More than eighteen languages are spoken. There is Somali and Blene from Ethiopia, Tigre from Eritrea, Vietnamese and Hakka, a Chinese dialect from Vietnam, as well as Farsi from Afghanistan, Greek, Chinese and English. Sometimes in the compost the gardeners find baby mushrooms tightly furled like fleshy pebbles. Whoever is there takes a share.