Here we have a tale of two cities, of a fashion.
At the state election of 2014, a late-in-the-piece Liberal promise was $500,000 a year for two years for each of the city centres of Moonah and Glenorchy. The money was for beautification, and was to be delivered through the Glenorchy City Council (GCC).
The council duly pocketed the money. In their wisdom, the class of 2014-18 decided that a million might be bookoo bucks to some but it wouldn’t go far in terms of hard landscaping; the council therefore decided to allocate the entire $2M to Glenorchy and worry about Moonah later on.
Moonah did in fact have some works done. One of these was to remove half-arsed humps either end of the Main Road strip. Apparently they were there not so much to slow traffic down but to provide ‘driver feedback’ that they were now entering a 40km/h zone (by day). Apart from a few chiropractors who lost business, no-one wept for their removal.
Two bits of sculpture were removed. One was a vertical metal MOONAH sign, faux art deco, that stood next to the petrol station on the corner of Florence. My neighbour eventually salvaged it from the tip shop for literally pennies, which just goes to show how much any kind of heritage is generally valued in Tasmania.
A much-loved black silhouette of a person walking briskly, positioned in front of what is now a pharmacist barn full of screaming jumped-up sticky notes in fluoro colours, was removed to make way for a rubbish bin. I say much-loved because several times I saw the sculpture decorated with a piece of cloth to serve as a scarf and thus keep it warm in winter. It’s hard to buy that kind of community, but easy to replace it I guess with a shitty rubbish bin for smokers to set on fire.
Punters are clearly interacting with the new sculpture.
Then there were the planter boxes. There are three at either end of the strip, raised uncomfortably above the ground on little pedestals. Each of these installations also features a table-and-chairs set of minimalist street furniture.
Where to start with this lot? When I was running for council in 2014, I asked an internationally-renowned urbanist (Brent Toderian) how to evaluate the effectiveness of street furniture and installations. Well, he said, give it six months. If by then no-one is using it, they never will. By the looks of it, the six months on this stuff had long since expired even then. Yet years later still it remains, cluttering up the pavement for no good reason at all.
The planter boxes had been empty for years. I called GCC to ask if anything might be planted in them:
– ‘Can’t plant nothing in Moonah. Services too close to the surface.’
+ ‘I’m talking about the planter boxes. The big red ones. They’re already there. You own them. They’re full of rubbish.’
– ‘Oh yeah, those. Reckon we can get the rubbish picked up.’
Urban gardens are not simply absences of rubbish, but my hopes grew. The rubbish was indeed collected but soon reappeared, particularly in the boxes outside Cooleys Hotel, home of many a bogan sundowner session and indeed the heady night-time serenades of Racing now in the sixth at Moonee Valley… flavoured with stale sweat and Cascade piss. But I digress.
Still nothing in the planters save the worst potting mix in the history of the known universe. I took matters into my own hands and planted some flowers in the boxes off my own bat. I kind of expected that a council roundsman would see the plants there, conclude someone else on staff had done it, and help in their upkeep.
I was wrong. The plants withered on hot days and I had to do my own surreptitious watering runs to keep them alive. They were actually going fairly well – violets! calendula! oh brave blooms tiny and tenacious! – until I was away quite a few weeks for work, and found on my return they were all dead. And buried in cigarette butts, drink cans and whatever else the terminally lazy need to dispose of.
The thought struck me, as I walked around the Moonah CBD and nearby streets (which I do on a regular basis), that there was more greenery growing through cracks in the pavement than actually planted and maintained by the council. This is still the case.
Florence St, Moonah. Florence meaning ‘flowering’, of course.
But unbeknowns to me there was movement afoot. A year later, one correa alba (a variety of saltbush) was planted in each of the planter boxes. Not a very spectacular plant, to be frank, but at least a solid choice that might survive with the meagre amount of maintenance the GCC was likely to allocate.
Then a funny thing happened. Whoever had planted these suddenly got very protective, and decided that no longer would the struggling greenery of Moonah be subjected to the indignity of chip packets and rot-your-teeth-bar wrappers.
Each planter had a fierce steel cage welded on top of it.
You could tell a lot of work had gone into this. They would have had to be custom-designed and manufactured. And then welded on top of the planter boxes. The effect was something like a mesh-topped jaffle iron, each slowly grilling a poor correa alba for your campfire pleasure in the heart of Moonah.
The piece-de-resistance of each was a sturdy padlock. Apart from keeping out the local rain of stubbies ‘n’ nappies ‘n’ split-soled uggies, it also kept out those of us who might have backfilled the planter with some small flowers for colour, or even some fragrant herbs. And made it night impossible to even see that there was anything inside. I’m all for protecting the environment, but locking up saltbush in cages is a bit much.
FREE THE SALTBUSH!
At his point I lost a bit of interest. Probably concern over climate change. Yeah. And working out that as the City of Glenorchy has the worst tree cover of any local government area in Tasmania, growing half-a-dozen scraggly saltbush in captivity was not going to make a dent in the challenge before us.
But for those of you who have avoided plague of recent and travelled from far and yonder to visit our Saltbush Gardens of the Realm, I have sad news. Sometime last year I noticed that not only were all the saltbush dead, and gone, but the cages had been removed too. A little later, even the planter boxes disappeared, although their ugly frames are still there, cluttering up the pavement.
Once were planters. But if perchance you have a cuboid basketball and need somewhere to play…
The one bright light has been the Moonah Arts Centre, funded – but of course – in its construction not by the council but by an Andrew Wilkie haymaker dating back to his balance-of-power days. A state government grant has funded the use of the old arts hall on Hopkins Street as a multicultural activity centre, managed by the Multicultural Council of Tasmania. These two spaces have provided a diversity of events and a community feel not only appealing to residents, but that also draw visitors to the suburb.
And thus Moonah, after seven years of the Kristie Johnston mayoralty, remains a culturally interesting if physically ugly duckling in the near northern suburbs. New public art? No. Seating? No. The lovely gay boys who ran also-much loved Magnolia Cafe used to put chairs outside for those waiting for the bus, seeing as there often wasn’t enough seating.
Paving? No. Street festival? No. ‘Activations’? At least not yet. A callout earlier this year sought expressions of interest, although nothing definite has been announced. Wayfinding? No. Historical markers? No. Something interesting for children. N-O (written in alphabet blocks).
Traffic calming measures or anything to make the main street a destination where you’d pass more time? No. Indeed, any pedestrian having the temerity to want to cross the street at its narrowest point, known locally here as ‘The Bump’, faces a stern warning:
And that, ladies and gentlemen and bald-headed babies, says a lot about prevailing attitudes to making city-centres accessible and appealing for people rather than drivers. Moonah still has a long way to go.
This series concludes tomorrow with A Tale of Two Cities – Glenorchy.
Alan Whykes is Chief Editor of Tasmanian Times. He stood as a candidate in the local government elections for Glenorchy in 2014 and 2018, and has no further plans to run.
