The site of my investigation is the Yarra River/Birrarung. Growing up in Yorta Yorta country, The Murray River/ Dongala, was a constant and important part of my youth. As a child I played on the river banks. I explored, climbed sprawling ancient red gums, bird watched and dug in the sand. I swam in the warm strong current. With my mum, I fished, caught crayfish and bait shrimp and collected freshwater mussels. These experiences shaped my connection to the land where I grew up. Living in the Dandenong Ranges, the Upper Yarra reaches of the river has become a favourite destination for swimming and summer evening picnics with my children. As we bask on rocks in the river, the sounds of the current flows over us, we watch for ducks, yabbies and eels. Visits to the river soothe and ground me, the river calls me home.

The Yarra River has a long history. There are many stories of the river, many different versions of those stories and events and often opposing facts all laid down as true histories.  These stories wind back and forth across time just like the river itself on it’s journey from source to sea. 

River Work inserts itself into this flow of stories, creating another version of events, another set of facts adding to the narrative. 

Seen and unseen, known and unknown. 

Rivers are contested sites. The world over, they are divided by civic, political and ecological expression. Wherever there are people, there are rivers. Rivers are sites of industry, degradation, pollution. They are sites of irrigation, agriculture and aquaculture. They are sites of transportation, recreation, imagination. Rivers are sites of exploitation and environmental reparation. Rivers have ecological and biological significant, and for a spiritual significance. A river embodies the ideas of impermanence and transformation. Rivers can bring salvation, and in the form of floods, devastation and destruction.

The Yarra river was a pivotal site for Melbourne’s future dreaming. Its urban sprawl and steady creep out from Hobson’s bay and along the river banks almost all the way to to its source beyond Warburton means this river is forever altered. Melbourne would never have existed if not for this river. Almost every aspect of the developing city was influenced and affected by the river itself and what it provided to the rapidly growing settlement, Yet, in turn Melbourne has exploited it beyond all measure, so that what we are left with is a ghost river, a mere shadow of its former self prior to colonisation. (Presland, Gary, The place for a village).

Each re-reading of the stories of settlement of Melbourne continue to confound me with the speed at which Melbourne sprung up, developed and spread across Wurrundjeri land. First came the mapping. Mapping is a process of laying claim, dividing and conquering and exploiting what is laid bare. The influx of ships and people and resources coming in, resources going out, land being cleared, (opening up the country for the crown!) buildings going up, suburbs developing, wharves and factories, slums and mansions, botanical gardens, government buildings, asylums, prisons, hospitals, all the murky, ugly essentials of European civilised society happened in such a short space of decades, all steps of progress tumbling over each other with frantic single mindedness. All requiring the river for water and waste output, all manner of sites were built and utilised access to the river at the doorstep- clay pits, boiling down works, fell mongeries, abattoirs, tanneries, wool washers, gas works, breweries, cordial factories, flour mills, it was even used to power the first hydraulic lifts in the city buildings from the 1880’s….Through it all the river has been polluted with raw sewerage, effluent from all kinds of industry, all kinds of rubbish dumped or flowing in, areas of great beauty and ecological significance destroyed, even freeways built over it and underneath it. Within 20 years of settlement, the water was one of the dirtiest in the world!  The colonialists arrived here with their english mindset, vision and english ambition. They couldn’t see the beauty of the land before them and this attitude persists through the generations. “We are only just getting used to being Australian, instead of our sensibilities being attuned to the ideas of another place.” (Otto, Kirsten, Yarra, 2009)

The Yarra has received so many dramatic and violent changes to the river course. Countless wetland areas, billabongs and swimming holes have been filled in, riverbanks cut and filled, destroyed or pushed underground, whole graceful sweeping curves of river cut off and new shorter courses made to suit shipping routes, sections destroyed for gold mining, dredging to make the river deeper for ship passages, widened to make ports, islands created, it had been damned, even bridges built on its banks, then the river rerouted underneath and freeways built over the top.

For all of the previous two centuries, the Yarra river equalled a class divide. On the East and then as it changes course, the south sides with few exceptions, lived the wealthy on their large blocks of land with mansions and tree lined avenues, on the West and North side, were the working class in their small cottages crammed into narrow treeless streets.

As present day residents of Melbourne, regardless of which side of the bank we live, we all have a relationship with the river. We might not have personally altered its course or damaged its banks, but as we live and move through the suburbs, through proxy we are tangled.

“The stuff you throw on the ground or wash away, the cigarette butts, plastic bags, old paint, drink bottles, dog shit, motor oil, six pack collars, old chemicals, take away polystyrene, straws, cigarette lighters, syringes, detergent filthy water, say hello to it again, flowing in the river. It doesn’t go anywhere else the sewerage system is completely separate. Most of Melbourne (more than 4000 square kms) is river land, and that means river water.”* (Otto, Kirsten, Yarra )

The Yarra river banks have always been sites for human engagement. The Wurrundjeri had significant meeting grounds along the shore, and sites for eeling, hunting, fishing. Since colonisation, the river has provided people with all kinds of leisure, recreational activities, entertainment from turn of the century spectacles, carnivals and regattas to contemporary river cruises, floating restaurants, golfing, picnics, walking, and cycling along the purpose built Yarra trail. Traversing both public and private lands river banks are both accessible and inaccessible, public and private. The river itself is a place for swimming, fishing, kayaking, boating, cruising, rowing. The river is also a site for and subject of much artistic endeavours. From the first paintings by Eugene Von Gerard depicting the colonial settlement, to the painters of the Heidelberg school through to the fish installation for the 2006 Commonwealth Games, the annual Birdman Rally as part of the Moomba festival, Eel Trap on the Maribrynong river in 2019, ArtPlay at Birrarung Marr, Rising Festival’s The River Sings and Wandering Stars the lantern installation on the river the Yarra has been a major site and subject for art and artists.

Deborah Cheetham AO says of her project “The Rivers Sing’ for Rising 2021 ‘Nature and the built environment speak to one another and find a common language’ (Cheetham, Deborah, Rising Podcast) This resonated with me as I explored sites along the river and researched more about the history of the city.  Bridges are the interface where human and non human intercept. It is like a negotiation takes place along the bank, a point of contact, a balancing act between what was,  what is and what could be. Bridges seemed like a good starting point for this exploration. They are an intersection between people and river, of urban and nature. They are a threshold, a crossing point. They are the tangible proof of how thoroughly entwined we are.

The choice of the bridge as a site represents an imaginary space between human and non human. The Anthroprocene invokes us to imagine worlds ‘passing out of the territories of man and into the territory of earth”. The Age of the Anthroprocene (then) invokes an imaginary that is also a cosmology." Art in the Anthroprocene Taking performative actions along the sites of the river, at the thresholds of human and nature, I ask the question, am I the river? (Tsing, Anna, Arts of living on a Damaged Planet.)

There are about 60 bridges than span the river along its 252km length. The bridges I visited all varied in age, style, condition, purpose. There are railway bridges across tributaries, turn of the century pedestrian suspensions, modern high concrete and steel bridges along the Yarra trail, bridges from another time built in the 1890’s, bridges built from Oregon transported by ship in the early days of the city’s development. There are bridges busy with traffic, conduits for busy schedules, one lane bridges made of timber discovered in a back loop of the river, bridges covered in graffiti and bridges protected from graffiti. Each bridge location and each point of the river I interacted with dictated how the work would unfold and be performed. Access to the river bank for the camera and tripod dictated the shots, as did the pedestrian access for the performance, the bridge height affected how much fabric to be used, the wind and weather the way the fabric would fall and the current direction depending on the loop of the river and which bank I started from, determined which way the water would take the fabric. Each site required a new negotiation, with river banks and grasses, canoeists, boats, ducks. On the bridges, with pedestrians, cyclists, vehicles and trams. Once with a ranger who had seen ‘my banner’ from affair and came to investigate on his 4WD motorbike, and once with a fellow in the early hours of Sunday (or perhaps the very late hours of Saturday night) as he struck up a conversation with my roll of fabric, worrying about the place ‘he’ had chosen along the bridge, to fall asleep! As a living entity the river too has a say it these processes…like the morning I got up at 5am capture on film the famous mist rising off the water’s surface…..(its namesake Birrarung) on this particular record breaking cold May morning after a 1.5 hour journey into the city… there was no mist to be seen! And just this week when I retrace my steps to re-film a performance, only to find the river in flood, the bridge in question almost underwater and the bank inaccessible! The river it seems, always has the last word.

The bolt of brilliant blue fabric is not innocent.  It serves to disrupt the space. It mocks and contrasts the silty brown water of the river below. The Yarra River is constantly being mocked for its brown murky appearance. However, these days it is one of the cleanest rivers in the world. It is the colour it is due to the tiny ancient clay particles being stirred up by the current. Where the river flows more slowly, the particles slowly descend, giving the river its famous hue. This is a feature of all Australian rivers.

What does using this blue colour say about our ideas of landscape representation? It is childlike in its simple symbolism. Yet instantly readable as a watercourse when placed in the landscape.  This fabric flows into existing narratives of the Australian landscape. It reflects colonial understanding of the environment.  Bringing a Eurocentric sensibility to the site of the work, to ask are we still seeing the indigenous landscape in this way?  Otto says we are only just getting used to being Australian. (Otto, Kirsten, Yarra 2020) But the damage is done.  Within 20 years of settlement the Yarra river was so affected by European inhabitation it will never be the same again.

 Like a banner or flag the bright blue fabric flies. Does it commemorate the site, the stories, the past- does it speak of a collective voice or does it try to bridge the built and natural environments? Is it at half mast in commemoration of the destruction it witnesses?

The act of throwing this fabric over the bridge seeks to point out our relationship to our rivers, how intwined and dependent we are on our river systems.  The synthetic fabric reflects the detritus of fast fashion. The second biggest contributor to climate change, the production of fast fashion pollutes waterways with synthetic dyes, clogging landfill when it is discarded after as little as 3 wears and contributing to mountains of plastic and toxic waste. It is claimed that at any given moment, according to anthropologists, half the world’s population is sporting jeans. Six billion pairs are produced annually. Originally jeans were dyed with natural indigo, mostly harvested in the Southern states of America by slaves. It grew seasonally and was the South’s most lucrative crops until it was replaced by synthetic dyes in 1897. Synthetic dyes are far more toxic but much more convenient for manufacturers, so they can produce denim all year round. The processes involved in dyeing fabric for clothing is toxic to aquatic life where it frequently enters waterways, wreaking havoc on delicate ecosystems. “Xintang, the town in Guangdong Province, China, claims to be the “jeans capital of the world.” Each year 200,000 garment workers in Xintang’s 3,000 factories and workshops produce 300 million pairs of jeans—800,000 pairs a day. The local water treatment plant closed years ago, leaving factories to dump dye waste directly into the East River, a tributary of the Pearl River. It turned opaque; aquatic life could no longer survive. Greenpeace has reported that the riverbed contains high levels of lead, copper, and cadmium. Xintang’s streets are dusted blue. And many garment workers have reportedly suffered from skin rashes, infertility, and lung infections.” (Thomas,Dana, Fashionopolis, the price of fast fashion and the future of clothes, 2019)

The fabric itself is lycra, a synthetic material used in fashion for swim and activewear. Although it is the most sustainable spandex option available, being 70% recycled materials, its source is still made from petrochemicals, it takes a lot of energy to produce and is not biodegradable.  This piece of fabric has been used over the last 5 years over and over again. Its synthetic nature means it is durable, able to withstand the abrasiveness of being installed on hard surfaces and muddy grass. It was chosen for its durability and in that at least it has stood the test. This roll of fabric has been walked on, jumped on stood on, rained on, had food spilt on it, been rolled and unrolled countless times and withstood many trips to the laundromat to be washed and dried in industrial sized machines, to come out shiny and clean, where we start the process over again.  At the end of it’s artistic life, hopefully not any time soon, I intent to find ways to repurpose it- either with making it into useful products, it is too stained for clothing now, but bags, garden ties or rope, or to send it to the fabric recyclers. Or perhaps it will become art in another form, and live on in a gallery.

Throughout this project I have not washed the fabric, it has been dipped and dragged into the Yarra and across the banks and bridges so many times now. I simply dry it off in front of the fire, and take it out again the next day to another bridge, another site! I rather like the idea that it is collecting , and holding the memory of the river, and its meeting with the river, in this way.

The process of filming was integral also. I used an iPhone intentionally wishing for immediacy, low production values and to reflect availability of resources during lockdown. The use of the phone minimises attention to the production process itself and refocuses the publics attention on the actions being performed. Processes of documentation and narration allow imagination to enter the story. They '“also suggest that stories can be a place of intervention, interruption and re-imagining.” (Grosz, Elizabeth, Climate change and the Imagination).