About these landscapes

I grew up in the northern suburbs of Melbourne in the early 1960s when Melbourne was already spiralling outward as it still is today. In those days you bought a house at the newest edge of the suburbs and built; just a little further out than your parents perhaps. My friends and I would roam the edges of the suburbs around Glenroy as far north as Broadmeadows; it was a parched prickly landscape of fields laced with the tracks for paddock bombs to race, a landscape of thistles and stones and danger, bisected by the natural delineation of the Moonee Ponds Creek and the unnatural boundary of the train line north, and the forbidden Trestle Bridge.

It was the edge of the suburbs, a kind of no-mans-land between the straight lines of the streets and avenues and the almost borderless world of the bush. It was an anarchic place where paling fences in a row marked the edge of the rule of order and where old barbed wire fences, stone walls or lines of pines marked the end of an old order.

Much later, when those places had been built over I became interested in those lost landscapes and wrote about them in poems. The lure of lost landscapes extended to imaginary places like Atlantis and to the lost landscapes of childhood at other times.

This part of the site is dedicated to the disappearing landscapes. I've read of the grand disappearances; whole towns being dug over for coal, or disappearing beneath new lakes and dams, bushfires too. But these are smaller, more subtle disappearances; the swallowing up of the fields and the paddocks and their reshaping   into roads and streets. Place where people will live their lives, perhaps oblivious to the older tracks and currents and delineations they have imposed upon. It's those shapes I'm trying to celebrate or mourn here.  

I thank those who have commented and contributed, particularly Pat Pillai and John Stokes ho have contributed thoughts and poems of their own.

Warrick Wynne

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