Elizabeth Farrelly
Are we seriously saying that a 72-storey gambling joint is an icon but an entire avenue of century-old Anzac fig trees, or a precinct of treasured Federation houses, is not? This isn't just a tower, a few old trees and some pretty buildings. This is a defining moment for Sydney. What, if anything, do we hold sacred?
It was near midnight on Monday when they took the chainsaw to the Anzac figs. Gradually, over hours, the police arrived, the chipping trucks, the arc lights, the fences. They selected a great, muscular, impossibly cantilevered limb. Then, despite a hundred picketers and a continuous ribbon of honking traffic, two fluoro monkeys rode the cherry-picker, revved the chainsaw and – to cries of "shame", "remember Bjelke" – began hacking it to death.
Outer leafy branches went first, like fingers. Then torso-thick limbs. They chucked the bits into a tray like body parts. People wept. People raged. But the felling continued. Next morning the once-bucolic avenue bristled with industrial detritus like some inner-city CSG installation. The wood-chippers worked overtime. Two magnificent trees were mangled stumps, two still in process. Limb after limb amputated, tree after tree destroyed.
This is by no means it. In all, nine hectares of tree canopy will go; half the size of Hyde Park. We're in a massive, global year-long heatwave. The planet is sweltering. Trees cool the earth, sequester carbon, build soil. And we chop nine hectares?
It's like the Premier – Casino Mike, Chainsaw Mike or (to quote Alan Jones) our Baby-faced Assassin – thinks, they want light rail? I'll give 'em light rail. Take that! And that! And that!
This is about respect, or lack of. Days earlier I'd attended the "planning" hearing into Packer's ever-swelling casino. If you or I want to amend our home renovation by 50 centimetres it's a whole new DA (and fee). But Packer's casino adds storeys, grows its footprint to 6000-odd square metres and shuffles the lot forward onto waterfront public park and it's a modification? A tweak that big? Like he already has permission? Like Packer himself is the icon?
The previous fortnight had seen arrests over planned house demolitions in Haberfield. Thursday, Malcolm Turnbull took the front page with his dumb plan for "smart cities". But when people called for help with the Anzac trees, within his electorate, they were told the Prime Minister had no jurisdiction. He can shape cities but not save a few trees?
Then there's the Indigenous artifacts. Years ago, when colonial remains were found on the Governor Phillip Tower site, work stopped for months. An entire museum was built to respect these bits of clay and bone. Yet recently, when light-rail workers found a massive trove of Indigenous remains under George Street, work continued. A few days ago, when elders and archaeologists visited, they were met with security and riot police, and the five-tonne excavator dug on.
These are not local issues. This is the devastating tail of on-the-ground Abbottism, the roughshod dismissal of everything regarded as "soft". Beauty, community, public space, heritage, nature, localism, Indigenous issues, refugees, children: these "soft" values give our lives meaning, but the new anti-urban masculinism discounts whatever is not hard and fast.
When Abbott was prime minister he told COAG his urban policy was about getting from his home in Forestville to the airport. Just as he validated misogyny throughout the community, he also validated anti-urbanism.
Indeed, in many ways they're the same. Cities have male aspects – hard and thrusting, money and speed. They also have female aspects; receptive and enriching; city as home, as habitat. In good cities, the two work together. They twine, they mutually support, they spoon, each respecting and enriching the other.
So the massive gender imbalance of the current urban war is unsurprising. Just as the pro-developer push is hugely male, the protest push – its people and prophets, the impassioned voices and stoic midnight vigilists – are overwhelmingly female. Of course, plenty of men and kids are doing good work, too, but the flame is conspicuously carried (as someone quipped) by older wiser women.
For many, this makes it ignorable: as though "women" means a few dozen gentry wives seeking a hobby. So not. These are forceful professionals: teachers and TV producers, doctors and businesswomen and politicians, as well as mothers and grandmothers. Dismiss them at your peril, for they bear aloft the values of the culture.
Soft? Sure. Emotional? You bet. Guarding houses and trees, the young and the voiceless, Indigenous rights. The chainsaws and the bulldozers made me sick and stupefied with anger. But let's be clear. "Hard" values are emotional, too. We are – thank God – emotional creatures.
Far from recognising this, however, and having a grown-up conversation about values, Baird's boneheads, like a bunch of Aussie blokes at a '50s country dance, have retreated right back into concrete-minded instrumentalism. Secrecy, lies, midnight action. Are they really this insecure?
Are there alternatives? Of course. The light rail could occupy the middle of the road, as in Melbourne. The government could impose proper process on Packer. WestConnex could be subtler, more nuanced and include public transport.
But they won't, because driving it all is a vision. A back-to-the-burbs Pleasantville vision in which the dangerous forces of nature, community, history and women are safely constrained within an engineered matrix of concrete and asphalt. If Baird has his way, our charming, eccentric city of villages will be as flavoursome as a six-lane hospital corridor.
Facilitating this vision is a removal of protections so extreme, a planning system so lubricated, a genuflection to the big and the hard so profound, it's obscene.
What's at stake is nothing short of Sydney's soul, its deep, irreplaceable magic, the many-textured play of transplanted Georgian London and muscular tropical vegetation. Nothing in the world is like this lithe, barely controlled tango of nature and culture. That's our icon. Tree-hug it today. Don't feed it into the wood chipper.
Read more SMH:
Are we seriously saying that a 72-storey gambling joint is an icon but an entire avenue of century-old Anzac fig trees, or a precinct of treasured Federation houses, is not? This isn't just a tower, a few old trees and some pretty buildings. This is a defining moment for Sydney. What, if anything, do we hold sacred?
It was near midnight on Monday when they took the chainsaw to the Anzac figs. Gradually, over hours, the police arrived, the chipping trucks, the arc lights, the fences. They selected a great, muscular, impossibly cantilevered limb. Then, despite a hundred picketers and a continuous ribbon of honking traffic, two fluoro monkeys rode the cherry-picker, revved the chainsaw and – to cries of "shame", "remember Bjelke" – began hacking it to death.
Outer leafy branches went first, like fingers. Then torso-thick limbs. They chucked the bits into a tray like body parts. People wept. People raged. But the felling continued. Next morning the once-bucolic avenue bristled with industrial detritus like some inner-city CSG installation. The wood-chippers worked overtime. Two magnificent trees were mangled stumps, two still in process. Limb after limb amputated, tree after tree destroyed.
This is by no means it. In all, nine hectares of tree canopy will go; half the size of Hyde Park. We're in a massive, global year-long heatwave. The planet is sweltering. Trees cool the earth, sequester carbon, build soil. And we chop nine hectares?
It's like the Premier – Casino Mike, Chainsaw Mike or (to quote Alan Jones) our Baby-faced Assassin – thinks, they want light rail? I'll give 'em light rail. Take that! And that! And that!
This is about respect, or lack of. Days earlier I'd attended the "planning" hearing into Packer's ever-swelling casino. If you or I want to amend our home renovation by 50 centimetres it's a whole new DA (and fee). But Packer's casino adds storeys, grows its footprint to 6000-odd square metres and shuffles the lot forward onto waterfront public park and it's a modification? A tweak that big? Like he already has permission? Like Packer himself is the icon?
The previous fortnight had seen arrests over planned house demolitions in Haberfield. Thursday, Malcolm Turnbull took the front page with his dumb plan for "smart cities". But when people called for help with the Anzac trees, within his electorate, they were told the Prime Minister had no jurisdiction. He can shape cities but not save a few trees?
Then there's the Indigenous artifacts. Years ago, when colonial remains were found on the Governor Phillip Tower site, work stopped for months. An entire museum was built to respect these bits of clay and bone. Yet recently, when light-rail workers found a massive trove of Indigenous remains under George Street, work continued. A few days ago, when elders and archaeologists visited, they were met with security and riot police, and the five-tonne excavator dug on.
These are not local issues. This is the devastating tail of on-the-ground Abbottism, the roughshod dismissal of everything regarded as "soft". Beauty, community, public space, heritage, nature, localism, Indigenous issues, refugees, children: these "soft" values give our lives meaning, but the new anti-urban masculinism discounts whatever is not hard and fast.
When Abbott was prime minister he told COAG his urban policy was about getting from his home in Forestville to the airport. Just as he validated misogyny throughout the community, he also validated anti-urbanism.
Indeed, in many ways they're the same. Cities have male aspects – hard and thrusting, money and speed. They also have female aspects; receptive and enriching; city as home, as habitat. In good cities, the two work together. They twine, they mutually support, they spoon, each respecting and enriching the other.
So the massive gender imbalance of the current urban war is unsurprising. Just as the pro-developer push is hugely male, the protest push – its people and prophets, the impassioned voices and stoic midnight vigilists – are overwhelmingly female. Of course, plenty of men and kids are doing good work, too, but the flame is conspicuously carried (as someone quipped) by older wiser women.
For many, this makes it ignorable: as though "women" means a few dozen gentry wives seeking a hobby. So not. These are forceful professionals: teachers and TV producers, doctors and businesswomen and politicians, as well as mothers and grandmothers. Dismiss them at your peril, for they bear aloft the values of the culture.
Soft? Sure. Emotional? You bet. Guarding houses and trees, the young and the voiceless, Indigenous rights. The chainsaws and the bulldozers made me sick and stupefied with anger. But let's be clear. "Hard" values are emotional, too. We are – thank God – emotional creatures.
Far from recognising this, however, and having a grown-up conversation about values, Baird's boneheads, like a bunch of Aussie blokes at a '50s country dance, have retreated right back into concrete-minded instrumentalism. Secrecy, lies, midnight action. Are they really this insecure?
Are there alternatives? Of course. The light rail could occupy the middle of the road, as in Melbourne. The government could impose proper process on Packer. WestConnex could be subtler, more nuanced and include public transport.
But they won't, because driving it all is a vision. A back-to-the-burbs Pleasantville vision in which the dangerous forces of nature, community, history and women are safely constrained within an engineered matrix of concrete and asphalt. If Baird has his way, our charming, eccentric city of villages will be as flavoursome as a six-lane hospital corridor.
Facilitating this vision is a removal of protections so extreme, a planning system so lubricated, a genuflection to the big and the hard so profound, it's obscene.
What's at stake is nothing short of Sydney's soul, its deep, irreplaceable magic, the many-textured play of transplanted Georgian London and muscular tropical vegetation. Nothing in the world is like this lithe, barely controlled tango of nature and culture. That's our icon. Tree-hug it today. Don't feed it into the wood chipper.
Read more SMH:
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