Walking in the Winter of Our Discontent

Winter 2020 unfolds as a season of discontent. Borders are closed. The joy of walking long distances through unknown, beguiling lands is lost to us and, as the winter progresses, even the hope of a sojourn in tropical Queensland is extinguished. 

The world opens a little. Just as we are taking in the rush of air and dreaming of places we might wander, sombre news arrives. Melbourne is going back into lockdown in a desperate attempt to stem a rising tide of COVID-19. First reports state that while we can still leave the house to exercise, we cannot travel beyond the borders of our local government area.

The City of Yarra, our home, is Melbourne’s second smallest local government area. But how small? How confined will we be? We realise that our mind-map of the city’s boundaries is blurred. We don’t know where the borders lie and how much solace now lies out of bounds. 

Later reporting is not so restrictive about exercise but an adventure has revealed itself. To walk the border and know the grain of it, etching its lines in our minds as we trace them on a map.  

Our best guess is that the border is 40 kilometres long. There’s some wild surmise in this estimation but in lieu of informed or contrary advice, we decide to try walking it in a day, looping in a clockwise direction from home and back again. 

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The moon in its third quarter. Saturn and Jupiter visible in the western sky. Early morning light the alluring blue of astronomical twilight. At Rushall, an almost empty train leaves the eerily lit station on its lonely way into the city. Ducks skid to a halt on the gleaming, black waters of Merri creek. The bright headlights of dawn runners and the odd commuter cyclist startle us as we weave our way through the dark woodlands. 

Three kilometres on we turn onto the Darebin Creek Trail and back into the embrace of nature. Magpies chortling, white ibis flying overhead, mist lying low in the valley. The sun breaking through. Our spirits lightening. The lilting song of Grey Butcherbirds; the raucous screeching of Sulphur-crested Cockatoos; Kookaburras laughing out their territory. The dawn chorus a soaring melody gloriously unaffected by the gloom of lockdown. 

Sinuous metal bridges crisscrossing the creek, past a private school, faux Tudor houses and a golf course. Through the foggy parklands to the creek’s confluence with the Yarra River and on to the Willsmere Billabong, a haven for semi-aquatic vegetation, insects and birds. Tree trunks metal grey in the diffused light. Wood Ducks high up on the dead branch of a eucalypt. 

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Following the main Yarra Trail now, tracking the border as closely as possible on a narrow, slippery, muddy trail, the river glinting through the trees, wattles beginning to stipple the bush with gold dust. 

Under the freeway, into Yarra Bend Park with its open grassy woodlands and steep river escarpments, a wild reprieve for urban dwellers. A building electronic soundscape of 3,000 chattering Grey-headed Flying-foxes. Back from their nocturnal feeding forays into the suburbs, they’re now roosting in the riverside trees and noisily interacting with each other. 

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A view of city skyscrapers appears like the outline of a mountain range against the cloud-blue sky as we climb up to the Boulevard to avoid a flood-damaged track. Soon we’re back down to the river on a trail that leads to the edwardian Studley Park boathouse where we cross the Yarra. We slow down to fall in behind other walkers, inadvertently eavesdropping on conversations ranging from the most erudite to the untranslatable. 

The picnic table at Deep Rock is ‘closed due to COVID-19’. Deep Rock was once a popular swimming hole and in 1918, Alick Wickham made a world record dive from a tower erected on the opposite cliff. Sixty thousand people crowded the riverbank to watch, a scene unthinkable just one year later when the Spanish Flu pandemic ravaged Australia. 

There’s a ferocious rush of water over Dights Falls and, just before it, the quiet confluence of the Merri creek with the Yarra, a highly significant place for its Traditional Owners, the Wurundjeri people. We pass images of Waa the crow/protector spirit and Bunjill the eagle/creator spirit. Trees now winter-bare mark the transition zone between the freshwater and tidal flow of the river. 

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Eighteen kilometres into the day, our bodies in need of rest, we stop near the Collingwood Children’s Farm and enjoy a snack and a takeaway chai.

The Gipps Street Bridge is closed so we leave the border and detour through the deserted back streets of Abbotsford, around Carlton United Brewery and the old Kodak factory, a graffiti wolf guarding a laneway of ghost factories. A pub promises cold beer and warm hearts but it’s closed due to lockdown restrictions. 

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On the other side of the river lie the leafy green suburbs of Boroondara, home to a vineyard, an abundance of private schools, garden follies and boat sheds belonging to mansions that sprawl down the embankment towards the water. 

We stop for a picnic lunch in the shelter of a grove of eucalypts, six hours and 24 kilometres into the day. There are more people on the trail now, runners and dog walkers in the main, so we keep to seldom-used side trails where we can. Near the confluence of Gardiners Creek and the Yarra, we come across portraits of Greta Thunberg and Jean Hinchliffe. In the midst of the grave disruption of COVID-19, young women like these two continue to work across the globe, pressing for action on the even more critical threat of climate change. 

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Chalk rainbows, hearts and yellow arrows. Under the Monash Freeway and a wait at Burnley Harbour while a bridge swings open to allow free passage to a working barge. We look longingly across to Herring Island, the only island on the Yarra. It’s within the City of Yarra but accessible only by boat, so we won’t be able to wander its bushland or explore its little known sculpture park today 

Another trail closure and a detour, up rough stairs and across the border via the Cremorne Railway Bridge. We’ve never crossed this steel and concrete structure before but it’s a favoured location for trainspotters due to the number of trains that ply its multitude of lines.  

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At Hoddle Bridge, where a punt once ferried passengers and their horses to and fro across the water, we leave the river, walking northwards for 2.5 kilometres along Punt Road, normally one of Melbourne’s most congested thoroughfares but free-flowing today. We pause to check our progress. We’ve walked 29 kilometres and given what we know of the route ahead, we’re confident we’ll complete the walk today, even if the last few kilometres are walked in fading light. 

Ahead is the iconic Nylex sign, ‘the clock on the silo’ awaiting its re-illumination atop another multistory apartment complex encroaching into once gritty, working class Richmond. We pass the highly manicured Punt Road Oval (across the border in the City of Melbourne) and, on our side of the border, decaying art deco buildings and drab modern showrooms. We turn left at the Victoria Street Gateway that pays homage to Vietnamese refugees, granted asylum when they arrived in Australia by boat in the 1970s. In the silvery glow of the late afternoon winter’s light, we turn into Princes Street and enjoy a brief rest on the wide grassy medium strip opposite the gothic Dan O’Connell, one of Carlton’s oldest hotels. Recently sold, its fate remains a mystery.

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On to Princes Hill with its Victorian and Edwardian houses and gracious gardens. Opposite, in the City of Melbourne, are the historic cemetery and the green oasis of Princes Park. Along Park Street and the Capital City Trail, busy with end-of-day strollers and scootering children, and into the most northern reaches of the City of Yarra. It’s a haphazardly drawn border that cuts mid-way through streets and cobblestoned laneways until it finds the Merri Creek Trail. We’re weary and foot-sore now but once on this trail, muscle memory walks us home. Just after sunset, with the crepuscular rays of twilight providing the luminosity we need, we arrive home, ten hours after setting out. 

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We discover that the border of the City of Yarra is 42 kilometres in length. It’s tightly bound where it follows major roads but more fluid by nature with at least 60 per cent of it following the meanderings of creeks and the flow of the Yarra. Within its boundaries lie swathes of natural bushland, tamed playing fields and sylvan public parks and gardens. There’s a diversity of suburbs from gritty, industrial Cremorne to the wide, quiet streets of North Carlton. Perhaps there’s an element of madness in the walking of it but it gifts us contentment, a sense of freedom in this time of lockdown and a glimmer of hope of a glorious summer.  

‘Now is the winter of our discontent. Made glorious summer by this sun of York’ Shakespeare

If you enjoyed exploring the City of Yarra with us, you’ll want to read about our Isolation Camino and Walking into the Light, in the last stage of the COVID-19 lockdown.