For a while after I moved to Melbourne, I would sometimes notice the wilderness intruding on the cityscape and immediately I’d feel an urge to preserve the sight in a photograph. A gargantuan gumtree might strangle a street corner, or a palm might spring up between two sets of train tracks, or a pine might peek over a fence at the dead end of a laneway, and in each instance I’d find myself impelled to take a picture. I didn’t set out with camera in hand to hunt down these sorts of sights. I went about my business as usual and looked up every so often to find them in my way, a dash of green against steel and glass, as if waiting there for someone to spy them through the ruckus of human activity that otherwise left them occluded. I’d pull out my cellphone and snap a photo and then I’d set off again. I didn’t know where it came from, this impulse to preserve what I saw; I only knew that on some level I felt an affection for the urban green.

When I saw the green sneaking back into spaces from which it had been expunged, a part of me wanted to cheer it on and even to see it triumph. I enjoyed the thought of watching it slowly reclaim a city whose urgent cosmopolitanism, undisturbed by the wilderness, struck me then and strikes me now as complacent and somehow presumptuous. More than any other city I’ve ever known, Melbourne is exceedingly pampered — the unruliness of the natural world has been arrested and landscaped into submission — and yet in my bones I feel a resistance to such a pampered aesthetic and a reflexive attraction to almost anything that disrupts it. Only recently, however, did I begin to see the source of what I feel towards the city when the Christmas and New Year period gave me some time to read two long meditations on life in Australia’s capital cities. Continue reading →