A cry in the night - Page 7

From Griffith REVIEW Edition 20: Cities on the Edge
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.

Written by Margaret Simons

I HAVE A PLOT AT the community gardens – but it is a different community garden to the one at the foot of the flats. Mine is full of aged Italians and Greeks, who have moved on and up since their migration long ago. They look at my sheet mulching method of improving soil fertility – a kind of compost heap built on the soil, left to rot and find its own way into the soil structure – and snort. There are no short cuts, they say. I should dig in double trenches. You dig one out, fill it with compost, vegetable scraps, lawn clippings – ‘whatever you have' – then fill it with the earth from the next trench, and so on. You have to work the soil. Double digging is the answer, they say, to good root penetration.

In the garden at the foot of the flats, though, putting down roots is more complicated. There was a previous garden on this site, but it was closed down when they discovered the soil was contaminated – the legacy, probably, of the old tannery. To get it up and running again, the soil had to be dug out, a membrane laid and clean fill laid on top. Now the soil is not poisonous, but still nothing is easy. Lots of people are doing good things, but still nothing is easy.

Things have settled since the cry in the night. After a couple of early meetings with police were boycotted, a dialogue has resumed. Berhan Ahmed is working to persuade school and police to involve the community in disciplining children, and stop the rapid turnover of trainee police officers. They want continuity. Howard says this is ‘non-negotiable'. Police have to be trained.

The end of the day approaches in my suburb. On Flemington Hill at Pepper Café, the African taxi drivers sometimes stop and have coffee with the white families, but increasingly they go to new African businesses opening on the main street. When my daughter tried out for soccer, some of the soccer mums were African women, cheering their girls in tracksuits and headscarves.

Now school is out, and the kids come down the hill from Debney Park Secondary College. The Africans among them are tall, rangy and thin. Although many were born in Australia, it is easy to imagine them stepping across some African plain, yet here they are in Flemington, pushing and mucking up as kids do, the girls in robes or head scarves, crop tops and tight jeans. They are smiling, faces open, as they push on through the suburb, past the heritage houses and the renovations and down the hill to the concrete blocks they call home.