Let’s get some Bearings
| Macdonaldtown railway station has held a fascination for me for many years. My earliest recollections of it as a child are as a tiny cement island which appeared to hover above a sea of railway tracks. Whoever used the station (I figured on State Rail employees who found themselves wandering lost among the dozen or so tracks) obviously flew, or teleported themselves there. Many years later, as a student living in Chippendale, I became familiar with Macdonaldtown station and its stairs down to the street, which was both educational and disappointing. I had rather enjoyed the flying State Rail workers: the reality of the space was much less whimsical.
For years I travelled back and forth past the station and the vast expanse of unused State Rail land adjacent to it. This land lies between the line to Newtown and that to Erskineville. Over time, as frustration with expensive, cramped inner city rental accommodation and trying to eat on a student budget grew, my trips past this site began triggering imaginings regarding the community centre/arts cooperative/performance space/workshop/sharehousing/all of the above that could be built: how many people could live in that old train shed? This was compounded by the growing unavailability of spaces for initiatives such as squats or housing cooperatives within the inner city as more and more abandoned warehouses and vacant lots were sold for development. As manufacturing and industry moved out, urban consolidation in the form of apartments or terraces moved in. The accompanying gentrification drove housing prices, both rented and mortgaged, steadily higher: a trend which has not abated. Gradually it became evident that the only way to secure tenure on a low budget was to find an authority in control of some unused property and start negotiating. With a relocation to Macquarie University, a shift to what could loosely be called environmental studies and a position tutoring Ted Trainer’s Global Crisis course at the University of New South Wales, these imaginings became more insistent. Who was using this land? I couldn’t remember having seen any activity there other than people occasionally walking their dogs. In studying issues concerning ‘sustainability’ and continuing to live in inner city areas, I encountered literature concerning community gardens – areas for community food production – and saw them in operation in Lismore and at the University of New South Wales. It was only a matter of time before this notion and that land started winking at each other every time the train pulled in to Macdonaldtown. So, the research underlying this thesis evolved from the initial steps of an inquiry into how the community can access land held by bodies such as the State Rail Authority, in order to grow food. The path the thesis eventually followed is the result of engaging with what it is that ‘sustainability’ may be. The world of ‘sustainability’ or ‘sustainable development’ is a murky terrain marked by conflicting, confusing or coded signposts; much talk and action proceeds in its name, but few would claim knowledge as to what these terms mean. Much political and industry rhetoric concerning sustainability occurs alongside increasing homelessness, poverty, ill health and disillusionment with political structures and processes; meanwhile, when left to their own devices many citizens are finding relevant ways of engaging with these problems. This thesis thus investigates sustainability as precisely these latter initiatives, focussed here through the action of groups and individuals associated with urban community gardens in Sydney, and asks what terrain may be encountered in an attempt to map the processes of individuals gathering into various structures in order to act as they see fit. |
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