Heritage Weeds in Latteland

8/7/2019 Heritage Weeds in Latteland

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HERITAGE

WEEDS

INLATTELAND

an essayoncamphor laurels, coffee,

democracy, streetscape, tourism

&Bellingen

ROSS MACLEAY


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North Bank Institute of Independent Studies

PO Box 153Bellingen, NSW [email protected]

To Bellingen with love and trepidation

Heritage Weeds In Lattelandavailable at:http://northbankessays.blogspot.com/

Heritage Weeds in Latteland2011

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Heritage Weeds in Latteland

To dwell means to leave tracesWalter Benjamin, Paris, the Capital of the Nineteenth Century

Bellingen is the capital of the Bellinger Valley, complacent about itsfame and preoccupied with its identity.

I wrote this essay about Bellingens camphor laurel war, beginning whenthe troubles broke out and suspecting that the events, which might not at rst have

seemed worthy of attention, were headed straight into the dangerous shallows ofeveryday life. My thinking was not entirely groundless. The camphor laurel treesare in the heart of Bellingen, in Church Street.

Bellingen is centred on a terrace of red soil, an ancient oodplain, now tenmetres above the river ats, at the tidal limit of the Bellinger River. The section of

Church Street in question runs barely a hundred metres from the main street ofBellingen, north to the edge of the terrace. When Clement Hodgkinson trekked upthrough Gumbayngirr country along the river in 1842 the river terraces like the oneChurch Street is on were mostly covered in lowland subtropical rainforest and tallooded gum forest. A ooded gum, maybe 100 years old, grows at the northern

end of the street on the steep weedy bluff that looks over the river. There are hard

quandongs too and some planted hoop pines. At the southern end, on the westernside, there is a paved platform, shin height above the road and fty metres long the caf strip shaded by one hundred year old camphor laurel trees and


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fteen year old leopard trees.

Where identity had seemed manifest and secure, the restless ngers

of planning-and-implementation now released the genie of history from its

connement in heritage. Many saw Bellingens heritage, and so its identity, in

the tradition of the one hundred year old camphors, mighty living organisms

that protected and graced the rites of Bellingens caf society. Others saw thecamphors as giant weeds, mighty but only in the tradition of occupying invaders,the ugly icons of their triumphalism. The camphors were either living monumentsor monumental weeds. Those who wanted to weed them out were, by their ownlights, renewing an older more venerable tradition, and redeeming its beauty forthe future. They were seen by those who wanted to keep the shady camphors aswanting to strip the earth bare in the name of generic suburban beautication.

Each side invoked Gaia.

No thats not really it. That is just one more way of putting it. One moredeclaration about just what was or is at stake in the camphor war. Nearly everyonewho wrote a letter to the Courier Sun the local paper that now traces its ownershipto Fairfax Media seemed to take it for granted that their own interpretation wasthe long awaited key to general enlightenment. I realise that introducing facts inthe face of uninformed hysteria is largely a waste of effort and printers ink, wroteDavid Halliday from up on the mountain at Dorrigo on January 5, but here goes.Nearly every letter was a killer argument or a cry from the high ground. Everyone

was passionate, even in their expressions of exasperation at the whole irrelevantspectacle, even if they were only eye-rolling. More than a division between twosides, or a revelation of the fault lines through green sentiment and Gaia worship,it was sometimes like a war of all against all. No one agreed with anyone abouteverything. Church Street was a clashing universe of entertained and entertainingopinions, enough strongly held to rumble beneath or erupt into and spice or sourthe most friendly or idle conversation. Shallow waters run in dangerous currents.

Natural and cultural heritage, coffee and tourism, all those shades of green

romantic and scientic, sentimental and technocratic, capital G and small g,deep and shallow each with its peculiarly trivial and important, demeaning andedifying aspects, all were caught up in the hostilities. The camphor war seemed torefract all this into its antagonistic, irreconcilable elements. As Edmund Burke is

supposed to have said at the start of the French Revolution: What a stage, what

players! Every Wednesday I found myself trembling with excitement as I openedmy copy of the Courier Sun, and turned to the letters page.


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This was not the beginning though; or back before lifestyle

On Wednesday 20 October, 2010. I noticed a letter beginning I justwanted to make everyone aware that Bellingen Council is planning to cut downmany of our beautiful trees in Church and Hyde Street, which make our streetscapeso cool in summer and so picturesque. Apparently they are classied as Weeds

and council has received funding to beautify our streetscape by planting new

trees which according to them are deemed more suitable. It was signed Ziggy

Koenigseder, Bellingen. Right next to it, in the two-column box where Bellingen

Shire Council regularly advertises development proposals, there was a notice:

Proposal: Staged Removal of 5 Cinnamomum camphora(Camphor trees)Property: Church St Road Reserve and the nearby former Telstra site.

The proposal was on exhibition for public comment up until 11 November 2010.This was not the beginning though. Not really. This was in the middle of

things; politics and history is always like that. The back-story could start in 2002when the Council prepared its CBD Management Plan, or 2006 when it adoptedits CBD plan, which included the proposal for the progressive removal of the

camphors. The prospective development of Church Street, along with its removalof the camphors, had been hanging around for a long time in the civic memory,

obscurely understood and seldom reected upon. It was something that nearly

everyone wanted, but each according to their own image. Their own very particularimage. Beyond the odd ripple registered in the Courier Sun, or by citizens who hadtaken the time to attend the consultation process, no one had bothered much, orat least no more than is normal for Bellingen, where public meeting attendance isprobably well above the national average. The coffee drinker on Church Streets

caf strip just went on ordering coffees in the morning and deserting the street inthe afternoon, usually just around the time when, if I was in town, I was ready fora cup and something sweet.

Or maybe things started back in the mid 90s when the southwestern sectionof Church Street was paved and the cafs colonised the street, and a metropolitanbourgeoisie began to pour into the Valley, attracted by lifestyle and real estateopportunities. The paving was built in an iconic, raised-to-ankle-breaking-heightstyle with references to open stormwater drainage on the shopfront side. It had

heritage benches and lamps, with the. authentic 1990s heritage look. It had tree-guards-cum-planter-boxes around the camphors and newly planted leopard trees.The leopards had an accompaniment of murraya, cunjevoi or native elephants ears,


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and assorted horticultural colour. Periclean Mayor Sue Dethridge was all ready tocut the red ribbon when a bunch of clowns took over. History records that Petalhanded the mayor a pair of garden shears to do the honours, and with Sid on drumand Taco on trombone, Floomey and Bluff serenaded an urban space that wouldrival the Piazza San Marco. A year or so later there was a scare that the kiddies were

eating the cunjevois in the planter boxes while their parents drank coffee. The childkillers went and now the only plant remaining, besides the leopards, is a weedy littlemurraya, joining the camphors, cocos palms and cadaghi as one of the suite ofenvironmental weeds gracing the piazza. The planter boxes are still good for sittingon, penning toddlers and letting the dog have a piss.

No. It all started before that, back in the 80s when caf society seepedinto a Bellingen where cannabis, not caffeine, was still the most famous drug. Andeven that was in the wake of the 1970s when an earlier, younger, poorer but still

bourgeois wave of settlers had arrived with enough pooled cash to buy up old farms.Pre sea-changers, they arrived back before life style had been properly invented,hoping and expecting to invent something else. But when they got labelled hippiesand alternative lifestyle, they ended up helping to invent lifestyle despite their bestintentions. Those that survive remember the decline and fall of the old Elite Caf,unacknowledged heritage that slipped into oblivion. La Bohmeand then Martha &Marios, down the river end of Church Street were the warm up acts of 80s cafsociety. And The Boiling Billywas already doing its heritage mix of at white and

Prince of Wales tea when Barry Smith parachuted into town and refurbished theHammond & Wheatley Emporiumwith its CarriagewayCafrunning long and narrowand metropolitan down the western side. With that, naturalists recorded possible

sitings of baristas and the espresso machines were all red up and frothing.

On the other hand maybe this all started when environmentalism embracedrestoration ecology back in the 1970s, or when in the 80s and 90s bureaucraciestook to restoration ecology in their own way and camphors became environmentalweeds. Or it starts when the 100 year old camphors in Church Street were planted,

by who knows whose hands. Or in the late nineteenth century when camphorsbecame the tree of choice to replace the shade cleared too hastily from the northcoast valleys, or even when the rst camphors came to Australia sometime back

in the 1820s.

This was not the beginning though; or back before lifestyle


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The Bellingen Dreamtime v. the Tree Retention

Priority MatrixWe justify or explain something in terms of something else. Thats what

reasons are. When someone tries to say that something, like a tree, is valuable initself or for itself, few are impressed. It sounds desperate. The word why urgesus elsewhere: away to the wider world, to the greater good, to the deeper principle.No wonder then that justication can end up as a kind of exercise in distraction, a

cosmic trick played on us by the ruse of reason. No wonder that debate is alwaysleading us away from what matters, and our thoughts go cluttering like a hey-gomad as Laurence Sterne said and by treading the same steps over and over again,they presently make a road of it. So the camphor debate shot off to tourism, toenvironmental weed strategies, to consultation and political process, to amenity, topersonalities, to childhood memories and to heritage. Anything to avoid the issue.Even though the Councils consultant had declared the Church Street camphorsheritage, thus making it ofcial, in Bellingen the most well worn tracks lead to

heritage anyway, and the Devil himself sometimes shall not be able to drive themoff it.

Traces of the past, and even the rubble history, have their chance to bemade good by a peculiar kind of prestige, which only the tyranny of time andincumbency can authorise. We recognise such prestige with the title heritage.What survives could be a worthy building, it could be a trivial or ugly object, or itcould be the result of a terrible injustice. It could have started as a seedling plantedin a thoughtless, ignorant, unhappy or long forgotten moment, and ended up as a

tree displaying its heritage in signs of growth, maturity, and decline. At the sametime though, the stupidity, the ignorance, the triviality, the ugliness or the injusticeof the past can persist as traces too, even in the most esteemed heritage. Notannihilated, they also wait in history to come back and haunt us.

When George Moore began drawing his architectural gems for Bellingen,the Camphor Laurels had already been in Church Street about 20 years sosaid a letter in the January 5 Courier Sun. Like its author, known only as Still

Distressed And Disgusted, I had already found myself turning to history for somehigh ground. The big distraction for me was: just how old were these camphors,really? It was one little mound for me to try and get to. In shallow waters any


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mound is high ground.It became routine for the trees advocates to call them one hundred year

old camphors. Heritage was at stake here and heritage is measured according toage, and according to the prestige of the ancestors who have left it in their wake.

When I nally headed to the Bellingen Museum for the facts, a lead camphor

campaigner, Ziggy Koenigseder, had already been there. I didnt know the guy onthe desk, but he suggested I could save time and nd out from her. But I wasnt

going to trust the advice of anyone else on this. This was high ground I wanted toget to myself, my high ground. I didnt trawl through the museums archives but Idid buy copies of two little publications, Bellingen The Beautiful, a tourist promotionbooklet rst printed in March 1933, and George Moore, Architect and Builder, writtenand edited for the Historical Society by Norman Braithewaite and Stan Day. And,

after years of living in Bellingen, I nally paid a sub to join the Historical Society. By

the time Ziggy sent a letter to the Courier Sunon February 9 pushing the camphorsage out to 110 years, I had worked out my story.

About 1919, give or take a couple of years, two camphor laurel seedlingswere planted on the eastern side of Church Street next to the Bellingen CourtHouse. I have no idea who dug the holes, who raised the seedlings, who had thehonour of planting them or on what occasion. Two more were planted oppositethem on the western side at the same time, or maybe a few years later. I have norst hand testimony to support this, only photos, and supplementary text here and

there.Exhibit A is a photo of Church St taken some time after 1916. I came

across it on page 11 of Pioneering in The Bellinger Valley, another book compiledby Norm Braithwaite, this time with Harold Beard, a book that had already beenon my bookshelf and plenty of others in Bellingen for 20 years. Along with theGeorge Moore book this is one of those small treasures that a generation of localhistorians has left to the citizens of Bellingen. The photo on page 11 does notshow any trees at least not on the western side of the street. In the foreground

there are horse-drawn wagons delivering goods to the Hammond and WheatleyEmporium, the Mammoth Trade Palace, which looms large in the background.The photo shows the extension to the Emporium, the great shed on its eastern side.This shed is now the St Marks Basilica of Bellingens most beautiful square: ThePub Carpark.. According to page 22 of George Moore, Architect and Builderthe shedwas not completed until 1917.

The photo does not show the Bank of Australasia on the northwestcorner of the Church Street and Hyde Street crossroads. This corner was the siteof Bellingens rst Catholic Church, built in 1881. The Methodist church was on

the southeast corner, diagonally opposite. Hence the name Church Street. Thebank wasnt built until 1921. I suppose there could be small, planted camphor

This Bellingen Dreamtine v. the Tree Retention Priority Matrix


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seedlings hidden behind the horses and wagons, but I doubt it. So 1917 looks likethe earliest date that the camphors on the western side of Church Street couldhave been planted.

A photo from 1932-3 in Bellingen The Beautifulshows the biggest camphor,the one on the southeast corner, at about 10m high and 8m wide. I reckon thirteen

years is enough time for a vigorous camphor growing in sun on river terrace soilto reach this size. This camphor on the southeast corner always was and still isthe most vigorous of the four. In July 2010 Bellingen Shire Councils consultantarborist, Nigel Smith, gave its height at 18m with a crown diameter of 22m. Alwaysreferred to as the arborist and never by his name, The Arborist rated this trees ageas mature, its vigour good and its condition fair, enough to give it a SustainableRetention Index Value of 9 out of 10. The copyrighter here is the Institute of

Australian Consulting Arboriculturists, the backbone and guarantor of consulting

arboriculturists. The Institute designed its indexas an objective system based onset criteria.The Arborist also rated the trees signicance, according to anotherof the Institutes rating systems, as medium. This system called STARS is

designed to corral the subjectivity of value judgement. Consulting aborists arecautious and predictable souls who seem to prefer relative anonymity. They navigatethe troubled waters of aesthetic judgement, plant pathology, and professionalliability, while the paying clients and hungry community groups thrash and circle.They pour the gooey oil of potential insurance claims on the dangerous waters ofbeauty. They prepare their defences with minced words and decision matrices togive themselves the consistency some might say objectivity demanded ofprofessional authority. The Tree Retention Value - Priority Matrix (no on this

one) returned a Medium rating: Consider for Retention.

Another photo from the 1920s I would say mid-20s shows the sametree at 5m high and 4m across. The photo is in George Moore, Architect and Builderand shows four of Moores buildings, the Post Ofce, the Police Station, The

Court House and Hammond & Wheatleys Emporium. They were all built between1909 and 1910, on either side of Church St, in a rare ourish that still denes the

streetscape in the middle of Bellingen. This photo shows the Bank of Australasiatoo, built in 1921 by Moores former apprentice Wally Boulton. Making estimationsfrom growth rates is risky but these two photos are consistent with a planting ofthe western trees around 1919 give or take a year or two.

The Courier Suneditor, Greg McLagan, wrote the papers lead article aboutthe meeting of the Council on 15 December 2010. The article quoted the Plannersreport, prepared by Keiley Hunter. It said the trees were planted between 1940 and1950. The same article reported a claim by Councillor and former mayor GordonBraithwaite that they were planted about 1870 by Mr Hammond. 1870 was back in

This Bellingen Dreamtine v. the Tree Retention Priority Matrix


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The Browns had moved to Bellingen after the 8 year old future Senator had beenfondled by a teacher in Armidale. This is where someone says thats why Bobis gay. The spectacle of marbles joined tree climbing as part of the heritage ofbygone childhood pleasures that the camphors had graced.

Thats my story. During troubled times history becomes a refuge. It seems

to offer stable ground: what happened in the past has actually happened, andthat is taken as historys guarantee. Ignoring the fact that the past happened assomething ambiguous to, and fought over by, those who lived through it, we tellhistory as if the sheer fact of its having happened guaranteed our claims and asif the facts about the past are easier to know now than they were then. Or easierto know than what is happening now. Because who knows what is happeningnow? We are the parochial children of our own age, and we like to think time has

claried historys details for us, when in fact it obscures them and annihilates them,

erases the connections that dene events, renders accounts less adequate or false,and generates myth and legend. It becomes easy to make things look like facts,precisely because the annoying and inconsistent details have been tidied away.

Heritage, conceived as the material traces of the past, stands with all theauthority of an historical document, but we experience it and pass it on as we dohistorys facts, fraught with interpretation. As long as heritage is something takento be made true or at least authentic by time, or something justied by time, it is

never far from being mythological.

Informed taste and romantic enthusiasm;or the North Coast Camphor Wars

In 1826, almost one hundred years before the camphors were planted inChurch Street, Alexander Macleay arrived in Sydney to take up a post as ColonialSecretary in NSW. Governor Darling and Macleay were both Tories and Churchof England evangelicals, and Darling was accused of corruption when he grantedMacleay 54 acres on the harbour at Elizabeth Bay, land that had previously beenset aside by Governor Macquarie for Aboriginal and public use. Macleay, who had

come to NSW partly for nancial reasons, depleted whatever funds he may still

have had for building a planned mansion on the harbour foreshore, by beginningwith the garden instead, a grand landscape garden. The native bush was retainedand planted with exotics to enhance its botanical interest. The dramatic topography

Informed taste and romantic enthusiasm; or the North Coast Camphor Wars


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was embellished with picturesque structures: turreted stables, cottages, a rusticbridge, terrace walls and grottoes. Among the species planted were camphor laureland lantana. Camphor laurel had probably already been introduced into the colonyin 1822, probably from stock that came from Kew. At least there is a web meme tothat effect that crops up down nearly every google search path, but if there is any

substantiating evidence its not so easy to nd.The line about retaining the native bush and planting with exotics

to enhance its botanical interest is in the Historic Houses Trust guidebook onElizabeth Bay House. It is a sentiment depressingly familiar to anyone who hastried to deal with the effects that plants like camphor have had on the resilienceof native bush. The same guide says Macleays development of his garden revealshis informed taste and romantic enthusiasm. Macleay was not only a romantic

enthusiast. He was a Fellow of the Linnean and the Royal Societies and a leading

entomologist.The design of the garden at Elizabeth Bay embodied elements ofboth the romantic and scientic love of nature two sides of the Enlightenment

coin represented by British horticulture and Australian nature. It was a dreamvision of their harmony and resolution in the art of landscape. Macleays familymotto was Spes ancora vitae, hope is the anchor of life. But it takes more than hopeto anchor history and nature. They arent anchorage. They shift in unexpected ways.The same vision of reconciled bush and horticulture or at least its descendant, wasstill unravelling in the camphor war. If there were sides in Bellingen, then for one

side it was still a daydream, for the other it had become a nightmare.The camphor wars have been simmering throughout the NSW north

coast for years, especially in the lowland valleys of the coastal rivers. There were

seldom open hostilities, although I do remember an exchange of re in a session

on camphors at a rainforest regeneration conference.By the time the rainforests along the Bellinger were being cleared in the

late nineteenth century, camphor laurel was seen as a perfect tree to replace shadelost in the haste of clearing: fast growing, a dense crown, and if not a commercial

proposition for camphor oil, at least a curiosity of oriental horticulture. It was alsovery hardy. It grew on the alluvial ats, the river terraces and the ridge country of

the Bellinger. It fruited, it fed pigeons, doves, gbirds, bowerbirds and honeyeaters,

and it came up self sown and thrived. By 1900 people had noticed its ability toself sow and spread. (Joe Friend, anti-camphor warrior, cites the Lismore NorthernStaron this. More on Joe later.) It was planted in several places around Bellingenincluding in the school grounds and Church Street, but now most of the treesyou see are self-sown. It is the most common tree in the cleared lowlands ofthe Bellinger and Never Never valleys. It lines roads, fences and creeks, shadespaddocks and edges the bush at the back of farms. An aggressive invader, it is acommon element of rainforest regrowth and of the rainforest understorey of tall



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wet eucalypt forest, one of a suite of weeds that messes with the resilience andthe diversity of these native forests. Unlike all the other common weed invadersin these forests, a camphor grows into a big spreading tree, and big is beautiful in

tree aesthetics. To a tree lover they can look magnicent, while to a lover of native

forest they look like weeds, weeds that dominate and replace the native tree canopy,

and transform the forest. Nowadays the Bellinger Valley looks like the BellingerValley because of camphor laurels. The camphor look is one of the exact qualitiesthat distinguish Bellingen and contribute to its identity. a line Craig Burtonused in has January 12 letter to the Courier Sun. Once restoration ecology or bushregeneration became part of modern Australian nature culture, tree lovers andnative bush lovers began to clash. Pigeon lovers sometimes weighed in against thenative plant lovers, or cautioned that if they got rid of the camphors overnight,the pigeons would have nothing to eat. It has been going on since the 80s. The tree

lovers seemed ignorant and nave to the native bush lovers, the bush lovers seemedlike botanical purists or fundamentalists to the tree lovers; the camphor loverswere environmental vandals or woolly sentimentalists, the native bush lovers wereweed Nazis, or closet ethnic cleansers.

So the war came to the streets of Bellingen.Where weeds are mentioned the concepts noxious and toxic are bandied

about. There is something similar and confusing about them. Noxious, apart frominnocently meaning harmful, is also ofcialese for species deemed by authorities

to require control or eradication. It makes noxiousness sound at least illegal andtherefore probably toxic. Solveig Larsen wrote to the Courier Sunon 12 January tosay she had found an expert from Armidale under the camphors in Church Streetand he had informed her that camphors were not noxious. This looked like a realkiller argument. But maybe the expert meant they were not Noxious in Armidale.Who knows? There arent many, if any, camphors in Armidale. Its too cold. Theyare Noxious in Bellingen Shire though, ofcially Class 4, a local declaration that

means that the Council or a landholder has to undertake a control program to

strategically manage them and minimise their impact by available resources.Experts and expertise were batted back and forth to add force to the claims andcounterclaims..

Joe Friends camphorlaurel.com is a goldmine and a mineeld of camphor

lore, legend, science, surmise, gossip and history. Whether you want to enter

the vexed world of camphor strains and phytochemistry, nd out how to use

camphors to conceal your dope crop, or just sniff your camphor wood chest,you will get some pointers from camphorlaurel.com. The toxicity of compoundsextracted from camphor leaves and fruits gets a lot of emphasis. Back in the 90sand early 2000s Joe waged a lone wolf campaign on camphor toxins and theireffects on water, fauna and humans. Joe was never in Bellingen of course. I dont



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even think he was even cited by anyone who wanted to get rid of the camphors.But Cherie Pugh cited him and did a hatchet job on his toxicity argument in the

January 19 letters. All she had to do was cite the Scientic Committee that makes

determinations under the NSW Threatened Species Act. The Committee hadresponded to an application to have toxic camphor exudates declared a threatening

ecological process. Toxicity is a common adaptation of plants. It protects themfrom herbivores or makes life difcult for competitors. A forest is a salad of toxins.

The Committee decided that camphor laurel toxicity should not be called a KeyThreatening Process. Incidentally, lantana invasion of native forest is a KTP.Lantana is probably the most famous weed on the North Coast, but no one drinkstheir coffee in shady lantana bowers. Its not a tree. Its a weedy looking weed. TheCommittee has never made a determination on whether camphor laurel invasionshould be a KTP..

The expert named on the ecological benets of camphor turned out to bePeter Andrews, another name, like Joe Friend, that hovers over weed debates. CheriePugh cited him to support her views about the futility of weeding the bush. Heinspired Ziggy Koenigseder to advise citizens that scientists and bureaucrats weremisleading Landcare, and that, really, camphors were good for biodiversity notjust the ones in Church Street, but the ones out in the bush as well. More famousthan Joe, Peter is not so much an ecological expert as a media phenomenon. Hehas succeeded in blending some pretty conventional water retention hydrology and

wetland ecology, spicing it up with a dash of contrarian weed ecology and sellinghimself as David vs. Goliath. Hes not so much a lone wolf anymore as Christamong the Pharisees. Hes made it onto ABC TVs Australian Story. Hes won anOrder of Australia. And as Ziggy Koenigseder alleged, hes respected by such menas Gerry Harvey, John Singleton and former Governor General Michael Jeffrey.

The Council had its experts too. The Aborists expertise was armouredby those decision matrices, devices for securing consistency in judgement amongcolleagues. Objectivity here is really a kind of consistency, and no doubt consistency

and coherence are criteria for truth; they serve as the backbone of empirical science.In matters of weed classication and heritage value any objectivity has slipped

away from physical evidence towards sheer consistency, the consistency not onlyof a body of facts, but of a body of facts and norms: received historical and

scientic claims combined with political judgements and bureaucratic regulations.

An expert here is a bureaucrat or a consultant. They are masters of and masteredby the system. They judge whether the camphors in Church Street are heritageand whether camphors are Class 4 Noxious Weeds. The judgement is mapped intoa local government plan, becomes part of the system and proves its objectivityby its inertia. It can take more explaining than a coffee drinker has time for, todemonstrate how a system that says camphors are heritage and Noxious is not



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inconsistent.The experts the councillors used to support their decision didnt much

impress The Church Street Coffee Drinker. The Aborists was just too ready tocondemn one hundred year old trees for not having enough useful life expectancy.Obtuse in that assured, professional way, aborists have little interest in understanding

that what people like is big old trees, a bit of dead wood, roots rearranging theofcious lines of paving, precarious crowns meeting over a road. The Planner,

who answered submissions to the Councils DA, went through the motions ofrecommending to the Council what it had already applied to do. The Plannersreport picked up on a meme from The Aborists report, a bit of ofcial wisdom

sourced from the now defunct Forestry Commission of NSW on no accountshould it (Camphor Laurel) be allowed near kerb and guttering, footpaths, sewerlines, where its vigorous root growth will wreak havoc the original document

and its authority lost in the memesphere. It quoted the well-known but unwrittenhandbook of prepared expressions as handy in its own way as The Aboristscopyrighted decision matrices removal and replacement with more appropriatespecies will impact positively on the functionality of the precinct. And it repeatedThe Aborists three recommended options about which trees to remove. Eventhen, the Council rejected those three options and passed its own fourth option.On 15 December it voted 5-2 to keep the two camphors on the corners of ChurchStreet the gateway trees and to get rid of the next two immediately to their

north. The camphor tucked away in the former Telstra site was also to go. This wasto be the rst stage of the staged removal, and perhaps the only stage. Any stage

two would be the problem of a future council.

Nowhere, somewhere, anywhere, everywhere;or where camphor laurels matter most

Citing dubious experts, or having to proclaim your own expertise, was allpart of the spectacle of the letters pages, and maybe the clearest demonstration of thetendency of justication to shoot off to distractions. Expert, like beautication,

is a word we mock with quotation marks. It advertises what experience doesnt

need to advertise. There were letter writers though who didnt have to cite experts.In his February 9 letter Martin Smith described the camphor monocultures on thelower Bellinger, and the populations of seedlings that top knots and other birds are

Nowhere, anywhere, everywhere, somewhere; or where camphor laurels matter most


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tirelessly spreading along the forested slopes of the Bellinger Valley. Camphorsare a problem for native forests. They mess with the resilience of native forests,take over and stop their regeneration, and reduce their diversity. Plenty of ChurchStreets camphor fans know that. But Martin summed up his big picture with ablunt strategy aimed straight at Church Street: the only good camphor on the

north coast of NSW is a dead one. Right back in a letter on November 10, TrevorPike had addressed the same big picture but with a different strategy: a plannedprogram to bring this weed problem under control should focus attention wherethe most benet can be achievedin rural, riparian and forested areas. Leave the

camphors in Church Street until after youve got rid of all the others.Both writers acknowledged the problem of camphors and both went for

the big-picture eradication strategy. Stepping back and looking at the big picture isa kind of primal gesture of objectivity. On its own though a big-picture camphor

strategy lacks whatever it takes to drive the here and now of action. Talking bigpicture is the perfect way to delay: planning about everywhere is no better thandoing it nowhere. A planners report for a Council meeting has to satisfy the mostdemanding of constraints. It is a high wire act. Finding the right words wouldbe a task worthy of poet, if it werent for the unwritten handbook of preparedexpressions. Saying The only good camphor is a dead one was not really an optionfor The Planner. Saying camphor laurel eradication is a regional problem and requiresa consistent approach aimed at gradual eradication was. Its big on generalisation

and coy on the particulars. The art is in the ambiguity and in the difculty of theexpression. Depending on the translation it probably says consistency requiresthat camphors be removed everywhere, maybe even anywhere and everywhere andwhenever. Martin was blunt: anywhere and everywhere including Church Street.And Trevor was too: anywhere but Church Street, until, he added helpfully, say2050.

You cant get rid of them everywhere at once, not because, as pro-camphor warriors occasionally point out, it would leave all those top knot pigeons,

and baldies and rose-crowns without their drupes, but because you have to getrid of them one particular camphor at a time. Reality is relentless about that. Its

concrete; its not an abstraction. Logic is relentless too, and everywhere is a falsesubstantive, like nowhere. Sometimes weed management strategists become soabsorbed by the big picture, that when you do something humble like pull out a

weed by hand, they say its all very well but the problem is too big to be ddling

about pulling out that weed. Actions are nothing if not part of a process, but aprocess is nothing without actions. Every action expresses its own principles orintentions, including things so trivial you might not state them because they seemlike tautologies: you take camphors out where you can, not where you cant; or youtake out your camphors rst from where they matter most, not from where they

Nowhere, anywhere, everywhere, somewhere; or where camphor laurels matter most


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dont matter. Thus people take them out of their own back yards. Some peopletake them out from an otherwise camphor-free valley like the upper Bellinger,others take them from an important patch of bush like a little rainforest near a

swimming hole on the Never Never River, or along Cemetery Creek in Bellingen.

Or a Council takes them out in stages from Church Street.

Both sides shared the assumption that Church Street is at the heart ofBellingens identity and the camphors are iconic. Icons, tokens, emblems, symbols these words all mean much the same thing, but they have different connotations.If one side felt free to value the camphors as icons and could call them that,thus invoking all the objectivity of incumbent heritage, then the other seemedleft with no choice but to see them as tokens for promoting camphor eradication,or symbols of the destruction of native forests by exotic weeds words they

couldnt say with much condence because they wanted to avoid the appearance

of mere tokenism or symbolism. They mostly fell back on the absentee objectivityof the surrounding bush, and on the gesture to objectivity in big picture weedstrategy.

Ambivalent and passionate:or black and white and green all over

Bellingen is a green town. At the Bellingen booth in the 2010 FederalElection the Greens got 33.4% of the vote, the Nationals got 29.8%, and Laborgot 23.2%. When the camphor issue came up a few months after the election itbecame a kind of green issue. Those who were pro-camphor quickly claimed the

green high ground. But greens were divided. The Green councillor Sean Tuohyhad changed his mind on the question. When the Council had adopted its CBDstudy back in 2006, he had been photographed and vox popped by the Courier-Sun:hed wanted the camphors to stay. That was before he was on Council. By 2010 hewas for getting rid of them all four of them. When the Council met and votedon the camphors, he was criticised for not consulting with his Green constituents.Heckles like Call yourself a green? were thrown at him. When the Council madeits decision to cut down two of the four Church Street camphors, the Courier Sun

ran a facsimile of the 2006 story. Seans change of heart was there to be read asevidence that he was a fraud or hypocrite or weak or had been corrupted by localgovernment: changing your mind is always risky. Perhaps some read it charitably: A

Ambivalent and passionate; or black and white and green all over


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sincere change of heart is better than insincere resolve. The local Greens distancedthemselves. Small g greens who didnt want the camphors were pretty quiet. Theywere exasperated by the fuss, or thought the issue a distraction, or they were oftwo minds, or waverers.

In any political dispute partisans ridicule waverers or mind changers.

They are fencesitters or apathetic or passionless, people who, according to SolveigLarsen., do not want to be seen as having a view. But wavering over whetherto get rid of the camphors was not a sign of lack of passion, engagement orcommitment. They no one could take or nd a cool position. There was

nowhere to get above it all. And of course it was local politics, so nearly everyoneyou asked did have some opinion, and, in the way of opinions, strongly felt. E.g.strong exasperation with the whole damn kafufe was pretty common.

Where there was ambivalence it was passionate. This meant that when

someone you liked said something persuasive youd think twice. It implied youwere of two minds. Consistency can become a kind of totalitarianism rather thanjust the warranty that grounds the denition of truth. If not in the sciences, then

at least in the realms of ethics or aesthetics, the virtues of friendship, honesty,goodness and beauty take over from truth and its dogsbody, consistency.

Among those who wanted to get rid of the camphors a lot were green.The push to get rid of them was mostly green. I could say, probably unfairly, thatthe camphor removers are more botanically inclined and more technocratic. People

who manage national parks or restore native vegetation dont like camphors. Theremight be a kind of ironic detachment from caf society there too at least asit exists in its high tourist form in Church Street. But I reckon its pretty muchimpossible for me to neatly characterise the different sides by any kind of psycho-social prole.

Neither of the two green sides could appeal to the ordinary spectrum ofgreen politics. Neither side could claim a deep green or radical green high ground.Bellingens citizens are a bit smug about all their cafes and a bit embarrassed too.

They nd it convenient to cite tourism as a reason to keep or kill the camphors, butthey nd it demeaning too. These were dangerous waters because they were shallow.

No matter how much people tried to nd it or just assumed it, there was no refuge

in green ideology, no doctrine, and no fundamental position. Assuming there

was, Adrian Woln worked the themes of undemocratic councillors, Wikileaks

and camphors together, and told the Greens to wake up. According to reliablesources of information the local greens are split on this issue and lack a policyregarding the removal of the Camphor Laurels.

This was in the January 5 Courier Sun. The Councils decision to cut downtwo camphors had been reported on 22 December. Cutting down only two of thefour camphors could have been read as cutting the baby in half. The news had



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had time to effervesce over Christmas, zzing up local chat, while the citizens

had time to take their places for the next act. Like the Queensland oods, the

January 5 camphor letters made gripping summer reading, but the camphor issuewas complicated because there was nothing so unambiguous about it as loss of lifeand houses. January 5 was the day David Halliday came down from the mountain,

when Still Distressed and Disgusted was still distressed and disgusted, when JohnBailey, dibs up, was gleeful that Sean Tuohy had shot his Green credentials. JohnVernon, The Secretary of the Mid North Coast Greens, weighed in and tried torescue the situation. He acknowledged the Greens division, said there were biggerissues and advised people to enjoy a coffee under the trees. Whether the advicewas a matter of Green policy or a personal take Im not sure. Its always hard in atown like Bellingen to tell whether people are speaking with their hats on or off.Mostly they dont know either. Hats, glasses and opinions are like that. Sometimes

you cant nd them because youre already wearing them. Each of us is a curious,conicted mix of individual and party and even as individuals we can passionately

be of two minds. And should consistency elude us, we always have dudgeon to fallback on or a hat to disguise ourselves.

Outside the capital itself, Bellingens big green vote didnt count formuch. Luke Hartsuyker, the local National Party MP, had retained his seat in theFederal Election, and now saw a chance to slip in the wedge. He sided against theCouncil and with the camphor lovers. By the 2 March he was making a speech

about camphors in Federal Parliament. It made it down the wires to a Courier-Sunheadline two weeks later. Luke had only just got his anti-ying fox private members

bill through, so he was ring. Before Luke though, the conservative councillor

Gordon Braithewaite had already done his own wedging without the benet of

minders to advise him. The ex-logger whod cut down more than his share oftown trees voted to save the camphors from the chainsaws. In the January 5 CourierSunGabriel Tindall, a former Green candidate and an occasional cartoonist, hada cartoon of Gordon saving a camphor from Sean Tuohys chainsaw. Inset there

was an old cartoon of Gordon wielding his own chainsaw in the famous BellingenChain Saw massacre of 1986. The ironies of history. When Luke took his photo opin Church Street I thought some of the camphor supporters there with him maybewould have preferred to slip away. The shot showed Luke under the camphors,coat and tie off, but with that extraterrestrial look federal and state politicians seemto be stuck with. He was going among the people as though they were colonisedearthlings, one of whom was Gabriel herself, holding a placard saying Works ofArt. Do Not Destroy.

The pressure to take sides might have a point if it werent all so middle ofthe road, like drinking coffee. But maybe the point here is that political engagementcan be ambivalent. Initially I wrote a letter to the paper which pointed out the



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problem of camphors for native forests but concluded: I wouldnt mind leavingthem and testing The Aborists prediction that their life expectancy is short. WasI calling for the camphors to stay because of a thing I have against aborists? Ididnt send the letter, on the principle that even if you write a letter theres usuallylittle point sending it. You never regret it. When, from time to time, I was asked

to declare myself, I should have told people I was writing an essay to nd out,but in honesty I would have had to add that it was not to nd out what side I was

on. At any given moment I knew that. It was to nd out what I really thought

mattered, just what the question was that we were or should have been taking sideson, or just what it was about Bellingen, and not whether the camphors shouldbe weeded out or not. The hard part was avoiding getting irritated by people.Passionate ambivalence is readily tempted to take easy refuge in the sureties andpleasures of whingeing, irritation, exasperation and righteous indignation. Or in

wisecracking, sarcasm, and devastating put downs. Its easy to be a smarty-pantsand there is always an easy popinjay or crackpot to target. And its bracing to climbto the high moral ground.

I hold two views, have two passions: it is foolish to cut down ninety yearold trees that are shading your caf; and its wise to replace big weeds in the heart ofyour town. Maybe to be ambivalent means youre twice as passionate and twice asunsettled: miserable putting up with the monumental weeds, miserable seeing themgone; happy to use the monumental weeds when it suits, happy to see them gone.

Or maybe all that is another complacent observation from another mound of highground. Anyone in a campaign like this The Councillor, The Coffee Drinker,The Campaigner, The Technocrat, The Know-all, The Intelligent Underachiever,The Essayist, The Crackpot, even The Popinjay and The Whinger, and maybe evenThe Aborist can nd themselves battling self doubt, depression, exhaustion,

ridicule, or despair. The impression that its a storm in coffee cup only makes itworse. It can drive people to distraction. What about this letter in the February 23paper:

Paving is being uprooted and distorted by big roots, paint is peeling offrotted timber street furniture and retaining boards, deep gutters smell of rottedleaves and pose a real danger to caf employees, diners and pedestrians alike, dogspoo and pee everywhere and the pavement is stained by years of food droppingsand spillages. Theres bird droppings on furniture and pavers. Ambience? Thearea has the ambience of a wet and dreary car wreckers yard.Like it? Proud ofit? Want to keep it that way?

Does this space encourage cashed up visitors, local diners, communityevents or night time use? Does this space do Bellingen proud? Or is this spacejust a waste of space?



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It was signed L. Saunders, Bellingen. Maybe by being so outrageously, gloriouslynegative this letter just wanted to break through the complacency of Bellingensover indulged identity. Apart from that, when I read this tirade, what struck mewas something that seemed like affection, even tenderness.

Latte Town of The Year;or from the burnt seeds of a weedy shrub

Tourism is secular cultures pilgrimage. Where the tourist goes reveals thedeepest secular values. Tourist attractions are the shrines of modernity: Galleries,architecture, museums, national parks, local colour, streetscapes, all places wherethe treasures of modernitys great spiritual concerns art, nature, science andheritage are on display. Tourist attractions embody that highest of values authenticity. Yet by attracting tourists they mortally endanger that authenticity.The authenticity that comes with historical experience and suffering, risks beingpreserved in the syrup of heritage as a kind of quaint outdated kitsch. Tourism

is one of the edifying labours of lifestyle, along with things like creative pastimes(once just hobbies) sport, volunteer activities and civic participation. Any timeremaining after such activity is the sacred residue of life, unencumbered time interms of we imagine the ecstatic possibility of pure freedom.

The caf is the public sanctum of leisure, where the Dionysian pleasuresof sheer idleness come out of the middle class home to be performed, regulatedand sanctioned by public rites. Church Street is a sanctum, alfresco, acapella. Aninfusion made from the burnt seeds of a weedy shrub that, like camphor, invades

the lowland rainforests of the Bellinger Valley, coffee is the eucharist of lifestyle.Coffees rites allow for performances of piety, expertise, connoisseurship andcreative expression. There are the subtleties of roasts and blends, the ethics ofsourcing, the precision of preparation, the matching of brew to time of day, thesophistication of names and nuances of concoction like short black, macchiato,latte, cappuccino & at white. There is the holy grail of good coffee. There is

even the grace of distraction: for the whole rite is primarily performed as moodand ambience of the conversation or the solitude or the reverie of the coffee

drinker. By the curious self-generating workings of secular modernity, the drug atthe centre of the rites conducted in this sanctum of leisure is a stimulant to work,thus leisure is sanctioned as the complement of work, which remains as the highest

Latte Town of The Year; or from the burnt seeds of a weedy shrub


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even if the most tedious form of action..Coffee is also a refuge from infantilism. The dark bitter drug advertises

itself as grown up, but without the stupor of alcohol. Latte and cappuccino, likecomfort foods, are not so much concessions to infantilism as they are the permittedindulgences of what the middle class likes to call guilty pleasure. They can also

excuse themselves as utilitarian if drunk at a working breakfast, or at least beforelunch. The caf is a bolthole for authenticity too, a little refuge from the malland supermarket. It has baristas rather than food technologists, food rather thantake-aways. It even provides a refuge where the tourist, exhausted by a stint at theattraction, can rest after the work of tourism has been done or even whinge abouttourism and the decline of authenticity. The caf itself though is imperilled by thesame decline: the life of the caf is legendary. It begins with a brief and gloriousgolden age when the coffee is the best in town and only those in the know know

it. Then comes the humdrum of its middle age with over-crowding by hoi polloi,blow-ins and tourists. The coffee suffers. And the end is a dismal tale of declineinto desertion, neglect and selling off the business.

Coffee is a zeitgeist thing. The vocab blends the smart Australian of shortblack and at whitewith the cosmopolitan of espresso, cappuccino and macchiato. Eachterm can be precisely dated in the archaeology of caf society. The modern age ofcoffee signies the decline of the Anglo pot of tea. In Australia its partly a result

of post war immigration, especially Italian, but its more to do with the middle

class cosmopolitanism of international tourist culture. Apart from coffee, what oldcafs used to list as hot beverages now run to green and herbal teas for detox, chaifor Hinduphiles, and English Breakfast or Earl Grey if black tea is still your brew.The teabag of English Breakfast is what Anglo culture has come to. Althoughcoffee was the caffeine of choice in eighteenth century England, Australia was anation built on the drugs of the Empires plantations and the nineteenth centuryindustrial working class. Earl Grey is like English Breakfast but with the lemondetergent not rinsed from the cup, and chai is what Indian resourcefulness made

with the dust the English tea merchants didnt want and the unpasteurised milkproduced by a nation full of cows. In Bellingen, if you want oolong or keemun,you will have to wait till you can go to yum cha or go home.

If there were an award for Latte Town of The Year Bellingen wouldhave won it by now. Maybe the Chamber of Commerce could put signs up on theapproaches to town: Bellingen, Latteland. In addition, as the travel articles willtell you, destination Bellingen is world famous for National Parks, rainforest, TheGlobal, The Jazz Festival, the Monthly Market, David Helfgott, George Negus,Peter Carey, No.2 Oak Street, and Eucalyptus, the unmade movie of Murray Bailsnovel starring Russell Crowe and Nicole Kidman. The hardwood industry, M.O.s

and marihuana have dropped off the list. Sleepy North Coast timber town has

Latte Town of The Year; or from the burnt seeds of a weedy shrub


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given way to natural surrounds and bohemian vibe.Tourism is serious business and, as the letters reminded the readers of

the Courier Sun. tourism was at stake in Church Street. Whether it was the coffeethat attracted them or what Dawn Lewis, in her March 23 letter, called the shadyunsophisticated centre, tourists wrote to the paper from Europe and North

America. Dr William Maxwell from the UK Institute of Travel and Tourism,feared that the tourist attraction would lose a little more of its country charmand become a soul less area a bit like Bankstown Mall. On the one hand thereis nothing so demeaning to a town as tourism. To be a tourist attraction is to sellones soul. People who live in a tourist attraction become local colour. The ChurchStreet coffee drinker is probably authentic, but maybe only in that now dated ironicpostmodern way. Yet not to be a tourist town is to not care any more, to stagnate,to give up. New York after 9/11, London after 7/7 and Queensland after the

oods saw the return of tourism as the rediscovery of identity, the afrmation ofheart and soul. So deeply is tourism insinuated into contemporary spirituality.

Karaoke; or democracy

In one of the January 5 letters, Adrian Woln reported that TheCouncil meeting on 15 December was a mockery of democracy. A well knowbusinesswoman had pointed out to him that members of the gallery were silencedand not allowed to ask questions. On 12 January Anne Thompson wrote that shewas appalled at the way the discussion was controlled. On January 19 SolveigLarsen was truly amazed that our Council was intent upon the removal of theone hundred year old treeswithout proper community consultation. And, with

the letters in the Courier Sunrunning four to one in favour of the camphors, ZiggyKoenigseder wrote It is obvious that they are all deaf to our wishes. Back at themeeting itself as the Courier Suntold it the horticulturalist Richard Peterstold off the fraud Sean Tuohy: You got in on a Green ticket. I voted for you.Sean Tuohys response That doesnt make me your slave was a kind of heat-of-the-battle version of Edmund Burkes line: Your representative owes you, nothis industry only, but his judgment; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he

sacrices it to your opinion. Incidentally, the gentlemen of Bristol tossed Burke

out of parliament for his troubles; although, he did end up getting back in on akind of eighteenth century gerrymander a pocket borough. Right back in her

rst letter Ziggy Koenigseder had been clear about all this: the ratepayers are the



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Councils employers.

While principles of democratic process were being claried, the Councillors

themselves made very few public comments, other than at Council meetings. Localcouncillors seldom write letters to the paper. Apart from there being too many

issues to write on, they are wary of mixing it in a forum where debate can y off

in any direction at any time and where a response to such a turn has the potentialto bog down in week after week tit for tat. A bog can muddy the debate and thedebaters. For peace of mind councillors probably prefer to stay out and stay cleanand dry. All they have to do is resist the urge to grab the mike and get up and singon the letters page. At the same time, there is no being guided by any opinionpolls like the ones that complicate and steer the furious feedback phenomena ofnational politics. Bellingen had to make do with Cherie Pugh polling a sample of ahundred and publishing the pro-camphor statistic of 82% in a letter to the March

16 Courier Sun. It would have been easy to cry methodology, but easier to stay quiet.Lacking party polling, minders, publicity ofcers, talk back radio, and sound bites,

local Councillors came across in all the camphor clamour as deafeningly silent.When Luke Hartsuyker did his photo op under the camphors I assume

with a press release attached the Mayor Mark Troy responded with what Ialso assume was his own press release. The Courier Sun gave the local Mayorsecond billing to the local member in its article: Member for Cowper weighs intoCamphor debate. In the papers words (there were no quotation marks) Mark

Troy was surprised and disappointed that Mr Hartsuyker hadnt consulted withCouncil before making representations to Anthony Albanese, the federal Ministerfor Infrastructure. The Church Street funding was part of the post-GFC StimulusPackage, so I wouldnt have been all that surprised to read a headline like StimulusSpending Scandal Causes Local Heartache. State and federal politicians feed outpress releases with lines like that every day, for most local councillors though, pressreleases remain a last resort. There is a whiff of spin and media management aboutthem, putting them at odds with the public meetings, the volunteer groups and the

word-of-mouth networks of community politics.It was through such a network that I got in touch with Kerry Child, one

of the Council majority that voted in favour of cutting down two of the camphorsin Church Street. I emailed her and confessed: I am a closet essay writer and Iam writing one on the camphor story. I was wondering if she could spare sometime to talk about it. I knew I could rely on her for information. I wanted to knowher thoughts. We met for a coffee of course. Kerry brought a stack of Councilpapers and we talked for close on two hours. Every second person seemed tosay hello to her. OK. So local politics works through networks of communitygroups, contacts, shared interests and friends. Work, sport, art, nature, politics,friends, neighbours, rst names, all that. This is civil society, but is it openness? Is



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it community consultation? Where is the democratic forum? Is it the media? TheCouncil Chambers? Church Street itself?

Community consultation? Being someone in a consultation process is notmuch different from being no one. Hence the bright idea of pairing the palliativeconcept of ownership with consultation. A consultative process has its own

momentum. Once its going you wonder if it isnt a kind of self-steering machinestarted up by as yet undescribed cosmic forces. The Church Street process hadbeen going on since 2002. Community meetings are lifestyle in Bellingen. Peoplethink its sort of fun. For some people the machine is like a ride. Of course wehave engineers who specialise in managing the consultative process. A competentengineer has to make sure the momentum is already driving relentlessly towards thedesired conclusion. Its a bit like a nuclear reactor. Not a lot can go wrong unless atsunami of outrage breaches the reactor core. The engineers show powerpoints,

engage in dialogue, and ll white boards. They instruct people in the laws that, likethose of physics, are beyond the power even of the gods to change. They bringthe issues, the aims and objectives, the options, the criteria, and their decisionmatrices. Or rather they anticipate them and elicit them from the meeting andthey insert them like fuel rods and control rods into the reactor. But its a Faustianart: the engineer only becomes a master of it by letting the machine master heror him. When the people nally look upon the result, The Thing is an utterly

banal and cosmically alien monster. Who could have made this? Whoever they

is, only they could have. Drinking coffee might be less unsettling the caffeinenotwithstanding and more productive. But some people like the adrenalin thatsunleashed when the consultation gets going. Maybe they have a double espressobefore the meeting.

These analogies are glib, but the world conceives itself this way sometimes unconsciously and makes itself glib. As part of modern life wedont so much make comparisons in order to describe how democracy works,we conceive and practice democracy in ways that match our glib analogies. Thus

capitalism has always attered itself and degraded democracy by comparing it toa market place. Polls are like ratings and we change governments with no greaterconsequence than changing TV channels. Or cafs. Forms of life from one sphere,

say pop culture, are reected and repeated and make an eerie re-appearance to

haunt us in other spheres such as politics.Consider the candidates for Bellingens democratic forum:The media i.e. the Courier Sun is an organ of entertaining stimulus

and response. Its got the Fairfax franchise, its got incumbency, advertising anda distribution network. Its popular enough, and it sells enough advertising. Thereporting is mostly off the shelf like a supermarket, but with local specials anda deli for the discerning taste. More than anything else, what sells it is the letters



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page. It works like an open mike, or a karaoke machine. You get the impressionthat the lyrics are supplied and the performances amateur, uneven, vulnerable, butsort of admirable for all that. Passion and enthusiasm are often semi-disguised ashamming or overstatement or air guitar. People who write on behalf of communitygroups are like nervous singers who dont want to be on stage, so busy trying to

stay in tune you hardly hear them in all the excitement, or they are too boring orexcruciating to listen to. I wrote a letter from Landcare, but it didnt make the cut.People who cite their credentials come across like self-styled crooners who goexcruciatingly out of tune on the big notes. Occasionally there is a true prose stylistlike the now quiet Trevor Joyce, or a commentator-at-large like Darcey Browning,the oracle of Darkwood. When someone writes a clear, sincere letter there is thepleasure of relief, even if you dont agree. In the camphor debate, especially if Iliked the person who wrote them, Id want to switch sides.

Then there is the Councils intimate little Chamber. It mostly puts onobscure dramas scripted by its Agenda and the attached papers. Its like boring,subsidised, high culture. But occasionally it packs in a full house to watch, andsometimes the audience tries to stage its own script or at least heckle. Everyone isappalled.

As for Church Street itself? I suppose it is a kind of promise that cafsociety is its own shady agora, and it brings to the polis what the other places lack:coffee and cake with ambience.

Anyway, a sense of the Councils silence must have driven David Breaden,in his long, questioning letter of January 26, to ask the Council to sharemattersopenly and accurately for community information and response. Communityfrustration over these matters is boiling over. With the media so loud, the Councilseight years of discussions and tabled documents sounded no different from silence.And the failure of all that boiling over to change the Councils decision was nodifferent from good old lack-of-consultation. Ah democracy! if thats what youcall it.

A more Euclidean universe; or quaint hyper-realities

Oculus, a rm of landscape architects from Newtown in Sydney, hadalready prepared concept drawings but they didnt exactly inspire The CoffeeDrinker. It was hard to know which was more bland, the drawings or the prosestyle. These things always look like impressions of a 70s shopping mall, the space



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and perspective imported from some more Euclidean universe. The concept

drawings lled the wall space of the Oculus report with pictures. Some were plans,

some were computer generated artists impressions. Some of the more schematicdrawings made it look like Brutalism was back and coming to the Church Streetheritagescape, that lunchtime joggers would be running up from the river through

Church Street and back to work in one of the CBD ofce towers, that suits wouldbe standing around looking like theyd just own up from Melbourne. Maybe it was

supposed to be on a day the court was sitting when small colonies of suits migrateinto Church Street. Or maybe Bellingen was just going to become more vibrantand metropolitan.

At their worst these artists impressions are a genre like glossy brochures.At their best they are icons to the difference between concept and reality. I suppose

charitably we use their quaint hyper-realities as primitive efgies of place. Its part

of the everyday nous of the competent adult to tolerate them and look with themor through them rather than at them. Out of habit we usually make allowancesfor their limitations, adjust the drawings with a bit of mutatis mutandishere, ceterisparibusthere, and see what we think the planners want us to see, the same as wedo when looking at any diagram. Or at least I assumed everyone did this. In thecamphor case, those with the new vision for Church Street made their allowancesand saw their vision, the possibility of revitalisation. They could well have seenhyper-modern buildings clad in photovoltaic shim and bio-cooled by rainforest

epiphytes. But those who wanted the old trees to stay needed no imagination to seeall the generic development and the bland, abstract space that this kind of drawingshows so well. If architecture is frozen music this was frozen muzak. The prosedidnt help: The landscape approach to Church Street North looks to unifyThe landscape approach to Church Street North looks to unifythe North and South of the street, providing a vibrant environment for residentsand visitors to occupy and gather at all times of the year. There were sinuousforms, visual continuations and the termination of Church Street was going tobe embraced.

Craig Burton, a landscape and heritage architect from Church Pointin Sydney, had a letter in the Courier Sunon 12 January during the wet summerholidays. Bellingen had its own ood during the big oods in Brisbane. There

was the regulation shot-of-the-bridge-under-water on page one. A small groupof teenage girls lined up in tights and bare feet at the waters edge doing thattraditional Bellingen distracted gaze north. The usual pile of debris had latchedonto the submerged bridge halfway across. This genre is local heritage. CraigBurtons letter was about the whole Church Street plan. It was hard to tellwhether Craig had got stuck in town during his rained out holidays or whetherhe was writing a submission to the Council. He was concerned about the designcharacter, specically the generic urban design approaches that dont address



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the exact qualities that distinguish Bellingen and contribute to its identity. DavidBreaden wrote a similar letter on January 26, an open letter to Council. He wroteas a retired architect, wrote about the whole Church Street plan, and wrote witha concern about community consultation. His professional style was evident inthe vocabulary and content of his critique, like Craig Burtons. They also shared

the professional approach of solving problems by multiplying them. That is, theCouncil needed to do more planning. It needed to: acknowledge the undue rush,give Church Street the creative attention it deserves, produce a new plan thatincorporates more of the communitys (rather than the consultants) wishes,and get an extension on the funding. Failing that, it should decline the funding.These were quite different letters from the regular save the camphors line. Thiswas cultural critique, consultant vs. consultant, each armed with the professionalsprose style. It seemed to licence them to write about aesthetics, if you call a line

like the exact qualities that distinguish Bellingen and contribute to its identityaesthetics.

What does that even mean? or aesthetics.

When the Council called for submissions on its plans to build the viewingplatform at the river end of Church Street, someone had a go at architecturalcritique: it has a weak and uninviting shape and needs to be stronger and moredynamic. At once The Planner had a response scripted for her by all the wisdom ofmodernity. The spirit of the age was summed up in the aesthetics of the platformare subjective and it would be highly unlikely that one design would appeal toeveryones personal taste. She was being polite. She could have said what does that

even mean? Maybe what mattered in this whole Church Street thing though wasthe unspeakable: the aesthetics of it all. But if it was unspeakable, how come thosearchitects could get away with it?

They could talk about aesthetics because it was their job and they knewhow to. They treated aesthetics as something objective. If the weak and uninvitingsubmission had been about the materials, or about the platform not tting into

the landscape, or linking the town to the river, or embracing Bellingens sense ofplace, or even embracing the termination of Church Street, then it would have

had all the objectivity it needed to slip past The Planner. The idea that aesthetics isonly subjective is just wrong. We demonstrate this all the time. The professionalshave a profusion of words, and a tangle of concepts that come with all the inertial

What does that even mean? or aesthetics


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mass of aesthetics bureaucratised, and, to that extent, aesthetics objectied.

Ordinary talk is full of aesthetics. About the same time Bob Browns

brother was playing marbles under the thirty-ve year old camphors, the philosopher

of ordinary language, J. L. Austin, was hoping that eld work would soon be

undertaken inaesthetics. If only we could forget for a while about the beautiful

and get down instead to the dainty and the dumpy.On the elds of the camphor war there were lots of aesthetic words to

collect and classify. Some, like iconand genericcame up again and again. Some hada viral look like gateway. Some were from what Austin called the common stock,rich and subtle words that embody all the distinctions men have found worthmaking. But a lot werent. Craig Burton used words like gateway, landmark, link,unique,qualities, distinctiveness, ordinariness, sameness, and generic, each with a twang ofjargon, none unambiguously of the common stock. He also used concepts that

Austin would have said were infected by the jargon of extinct theories: strong senseof identity, sense of presence, design character, integrative, visual afnity, sub-theme, creative

energy, clearly evident. He knew how to make a knowing allusion to Spanish architectssonotablethere was no need to name them.

David Breaden did draw from the common stock with barren, boring,sterile,unimaginative, add-on, and uninviting, but with words like iconic, intimate, meaningful,appropriate and incorporated his professional experience started to show. Withconcepts like expanded spaces, prime focus, and skilful design, it was on display. He also

critiqued plans for a streetscape dominated by straight lines, but when he did, itput me in mind, probably unfairly, of the quaint little street that winds through themalled centre of Armidale, yearning for the Cotswolds or Disneyland.

As an artist Solveig Larsen exulted in works of art, of the highest kind, spiritof Bellingen, grace, character, immense shade, beautiful, natural, sculptural masterpieces, rarely

found, irony, and life-blood. She used neat, and sterile, and beautify, but made clear theirmention was pejorative by quarantining them in quotation marks. She also strayedinto tourist-blurb with soak up the atmosphere.

Oculus outdid everyone like they were paid to with revitalisation,sinuous, alfresco, respect location, placemaking, activation of spaces(by cars of all things)and embraces the termination of Church Street. Clutterwas the clearest word they used.

It was up to the unprofessional to unmuddy the waters. The all toounprofessional, L Saunders slummed it with blunt negatives like distorted, rotted,stained, waste of space(in an architectural sense), tired, and tacky. In the whole debatethe plainest words, and the words that made most sense, were negative. Its asif being positive has become a tyranny that demands doublespeak, and we haveforgotten how to be articulate in our admiration.Brett Iggulden, OAM, came dangerously close to mentioning Tuscany and invokedtrees in France and Spain, singing their praises with the words wildand old. He had



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no taste for prunedand tidy. And way back in her rst letter to the paper ZiggyKoenigseder was using picturesque and beautiful. Admittedly they are terms fromAustins extinct aesthetic theories eighteenth century heritage preservednow in tourist brochures, but that was sort of what she was writing, and she didhave a point. Ziggys cool in summer, and shadywere spot on. Damp and muggywould

have been too. And so would scrawnyand ragged words about big trees thatI mean in a good way. The point is that words on their own are nothing. Theyneed sentences and arguments to give our talk its meaning. I have used quotationsthoughout this essay not to rob the words of their users intentions, but to displaythose intentions, for better or for worse. Its one way to report from an aestheticfront, where what words mean is anybodys guess; and right from the start thiswar has been aesthetic rather than anything else. Thats why its important anddangerous but seems shallow.

If a lot of the talk didnt sound aesthetic thats only because it didntsound subjective enough. Its a disguise; we dont want our judgments to sound likematters merely of taste. But in disguising our subjectivity we paint ourselves intothe corner of aesthetic illiteracy, and fall back on terms supplied by an aestheticbureaucracy that includes everyone from professional consultants and remainderedacademics, to the writers of tourist blurbs, to all of us. Were all bureaucrats now.Aesthetic qualities may be objective but aesthetic experience is subjective too.We need the subjectivity to keep aesthetics honest. The line about the weak and

uninviting shape looked subjective, because it was feeble. You can only get awaywith a line like that or with mere taste if you have the authority to bluffand carry it off. Not only did the voice lack authority, it tried to hide that by justdrawing on the lexicon of bureaucratised aesthetics. It wasnt really honest.

Personally, I would like to saybigand spreading. In his lectures on aestheticsHegel thought that fascination with big objects was typical of a kind of primitivestage of aesthetic sensibility. He cited things like the Sphinx at Giza. In Bellingensprovinces weve got the Big Banana and the Big Prawn, although Bellingen itself

wouldnt stand for a Big Bat or the Big Cup. Maybe liking big trees also shows thisprimitive aesthetic sensibility that Hegel was on about. I like big trees, especiallyin streets, and especially when their branches meet in an arch over the road. If theroots wreak havoc, design for it.

Bellingens great street tree is, of course, at the Pub Carpark: the big

strangler g chewing up the square from its northern perimeter. Loaded with

fruit, it distributes its bounty to all who sway in its branches, who crawl roundits buttresses, who park on its tarmacked roots greedy for its immense shade. Itsgifts to the world extend far beyond its branches. It makes a leopard tree look likea feral cat and the camphors like daleks: theyre biodiversity maybe, but only in anintergalactic sort of way.



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Apart from that big g what interests me most in all this is that line about

the exact qualities that distinguish Bellingen and contribute to its identity. Itsso assured. It begs the question. It makes it sound as if we all know those exactqualities. But what does it even mean?

Streetscape as art; or democracy as artist

Its common knowledge: a work of art is like an organism. Its partsform an integrated whole. When Craig Burton talked sense of unity thats whathe was on about. David Breaden mentioned it too. There is no necessity about thisprinciple of course landscape architecture is probably the art least beholden to

it but it has been a persistent notion in western art. If anything it has been moreemphatic in modern times, where it has been supplemented by the idea of thecreative individual. We joke about anything designed by a committee and imagine

an artist as an individual whose unied vision guarantees the unity of the work. In

recent legend the artist is a hero whose will clashes with the meddling mediocrityof philistines and funding. Along with the notion that aesthetics is subjective,the idea that democracy is not a great artist sounds like modern common sense.Consultation is the antithesis of this.

Before work starts on our streetscape we furiously plan; we burn ourselvesout idling and revving. For years in the case of Church Street, for so long youwonder whether history has not just pulled the foundations of the planning outfrom the under the plans. The latest plan ends up being based on somethingscarcely important, someones hobby horse, that got into the plan because theywere there on the night of the now forgotten meeting and they were noisy enoughor made enough sense at the time. It becomes something so deeply sedimentedinto the plan that, even if no one any longer wanted it, it would be inextricable. At

the end of all the planning someone who probably wasnt there at any earlier stagecomes along and says its all wrong. For example David Breaden in his January 26letter. And everyone knows hes right: the plan is wrong somewhere and sort ofwrong everywhere. No wonder sociologists coined the term alienation: the planis alien, even to those who attended every meeting. Thats what denes the result

of planning by consultation and committees. Its probably what denes plans as

such. It denes modern life. Back to the drawing board sounds like the only way

forward. In all this we forget that a plan is just a shadow.

Between the plan and the reality falls the action. Or as we say in the caseof Church Street, the implementation, a word already polysyllabic with prevarication.The word is designed to spirit away the material sense of work, by attributing


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the implementation to the Project Co-ordinator, that is, to another manager andplanner. It is as if under the ever-growing shadow of planning, our division oflabour strives to relieve the work of its material character. The virtue inherentin doing the work with all its uncertainty and in its capacity to go wrong, butalso with its potential for re-appraisal, re-invention, redirection, and for making

good its efforts is stolen from almost everyone. Or hidden somewhere. Thework itself ends up as no more than a residue, the last, lowliest job. The landscapearchitect, the planners, the Councillors, the citizens, all leave the stage, and leavethe honours of implementation to the Project Co-ordinator, to the Shire bridge-building team, and down on the river at and edge of the terrace to a Green Team

of young Gumbayngirr guys. And probably to police and protestors. At everystage the process removes almost all sense of an artist or a maker. Any idea ofcreative individual is ridiculous. Once work starts, the intractability of materials

confronts workers at every stage. Thats why you get someone who is used to thematerials, like the bridge-builders. And in Church Street it looks like there will bethe intractability of a demo. Thats when someone calls the cops, and the policeand the protestors combine in a kind of collaborative opposition. They are workerstoo. It looks like democracy will be the artist right down to the line.

And what about this thing called landscape architecture? The awkwardexpression reects our failure to properly conceive it. In search of our concept

we scrape around for words, multiplying problems by combining urban design,

architecture, horticulture and landscaping. We try to make a virtue of it by citingmultidisciplinarity but its just another coinage working hard to hide our malaise.And we already have the problem that, if it is an art, then the design is done bycommittees and technocrats and consultation; the implementation is just anotherstage of management; and the work is a residue left to workers or volunteers. Theyhave to work on everything that the landscape architects multidisciplinarity onlyhad to address in theory.

The landscape architect is a consultant that is a bureaucrat with an

ABN in an ofce in Sydney with a list of plants, books of colour swatches,catalogues of outdoor design, and software for drawing up concept plans. It allmakes it so hard to conceive of what landscape architecture actually is and does,that its no surprise we usually dont do it very well. And it gets worse.

Architecture may be frozen music but not landscape architecture. As soonas its up, its up and running. Its got a life of its own. Landscape architects oftendo no more than plan, that is, freeze stuff on the page. But when they have goneon to their next contract, implementation and time thaw it for everyone elsesinconvenience. Because its so difcult for landscape architects to conceive of what

time will do with the stuff they design, there is a big temptation to hedge bets andlay off responsibility to clients.



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Bellingen will have new paving, new street furniture, and some new treessomewhere. Advanced seedlings in fact, of neat species with a reputation forcompliant behaviour. The single most important criterion for species selection isavailability of stock big enough to claw two or three years growth advantage for anavenue planting meant to last who knows how long. A hundred years? It is as if we

are trying to circumvent a dening necessity of landscape architecture by buyingtime, when really we should be making a virtue of it. Any work worth makinghas a life of its own. In its own biological way that might be the best landscapearchitecture has got going for it. Maybe time, committees, protest, bad pruningand spilt coffee can make a work of Church Street and by 2050 someone will besaying its heritage.

At least we wont have the bother of translating this work of landscapearchitecture into some kind of creative hero standing behind it, just so we have the

comfort of praising someone. And we dont need anyone to blame; weve got theCouncil for that. Forget Baron Haussman eyeing out cool subtropical boulevards.Bellingen will be denied and/or spared a star designer blazing above Church Streetor a local star shooting up from its own creative rmament. There will be no Burle

Marx wandering through the Bellinger rainforests asking nature what to plant,and no slab of meta-swank publishing with a title like oculus: place/street/visual continuations gracing 21C designer tables and permanently openedat the photo deck of Church Street Precinct. We, Bellingen, will just have us,

Bellingen.

This morning I dropped off a gas bottle at Carl Fosters garage. I said hello

to Kerry Child who was over at the NRMA counter. I went round to Oak Street

and signed a couple of cheques at the Landcare ofce, and I walked back past the

Gelato Barand saw the window being washed. A wounded James Dean was lookingback out at the War Memorial. I dropped a DVD of Caro Diario into the tardus atthe video store the old billiard room and walked on down the main street. I

met one of Bellingens green veterans, one of the generation who had helped stopa woodchip mill at Coffs Harbour a seaside suburb of Bellingen back in the1970s. He was pushing a walking frame back up the street and had a go at me forwalking too fast. None of that neur stuff for me. I went down the lane beside

the pub and bought a loaf of bread at the Hearthre, the hole in the wall bakery andcaf at the back of the former Carriageway. A credit to bread.

When I came out I walked round into the Pub Carpark. The g was big and

dark on the north of the square. It was the rst sunny day after a wet subtropical

month: It made me think of two lines of poetry:The exceeding brightness of this early sun

Makes me conceive how dark I have become



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Two backpackers, arm in arm, were dawdling in front of me, talking ina sing-song language. I left them for dead and walked between the Great Shedand the Environment Centre the recycled Funeral Parlour and turned intoChurch Street, through the precinct itself. I did a bi

Heritage Weeds in Latteland

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