Making Place Mean More
Author: Wendy Elford Issue: 2025-06-04
Making ‘Place’ Mean More
by Wendy Elford
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There is something special about visiting a place. The visit is important to get to grips (the exact words are noteworthy) with what you can do there. ‘Vocation of Place’ is not a straightforward phrase especially if vocation means doing.
In other words, until you are actually there, everything is in your imagination. It is doing by thinking, not doing in practice
So I would like to take on a tour ‘as if’ you were with me visiting a place called Northcote yesterday.
The starting point to remember that everything we know has a starting point in our physical, feeling and experiencing bodies.
So here we go.
Imagine you were on a light rail trip from a major railway station in a big city. The station was called Southern Cross. This city is called Naarm meaning ‘Place’. Naarm is otherwise known as Melbourne in Australia.
The number 86 tram travels northwards; the number 11 or 109 also get us close by via the retail and business strips. The tram is a little microcosm of people with plans. Going places to do things. Some push trolleys, others nurse children. We might walk from Northcote railway station. I have images of all of those transit points.
We go past Merri Creek. This is our main attractor – water and trees, birds and other critters. If you sit there you can see that it is full of vitality. If you look around, you can see that the surrounding places, not so much.
Walking, ambling on the west side of the creek we would go past an environmental park called CERES. They are reaching out for help this month to stay afloat. There is a café there. People are gardening, chatting, children are playing.
Walking, passing the creek on the east side, you would come past houses of different levels of health, past a child care centre, past a business park to a spot that used to be a warehouse.
And it isn’t a storage place anymore. As accommodation though, what can we expect if we were to dwell there? Is it a store house for people on the way to somewhere else? Or stuck? Do they want to stay there or to leave on the way to somewhere healthier?
The sunshine, paths and plants in the central part. A growing landscape but no kids there during the middle of the day. Maybe an ambulance moves through the central mews in the evening. Or a police car at night on the periphery where the light is low or absent at the nearby creek.
This place is only just making sense as a place to live, to dwell.
To look at it as an outsider, imagining a life there, what might I feel I can do?
Might I go across the creek on the swing bridge to my vegetable plot after hours in the dark? Perhaps not.
Might I go to the shops for my friend to pick up her medication. Yes – and only in the day time and with spare time on my hands.
Might I get to know the lizards, even the snakes along the creek. Or go for a run? Or go to the golf course? Perhaps, and all dependent on the time of day, who was around and how much I trusted the spaces to be safe, where were the gates and the ‘activities’ that make me believe I can be safe while there and get home again. And the Body Corporate might set the rules. No gate to the golf course here – too much risk that the wrong people would pass my front door.
It feels like this space has had a close brush with becoming something interesting but in the end it has fallen short. It’s not my happy place. And yet in some ways the stories it can share are the almost, not quite, looking to becoming something greater value we can learn from. What sparks are struck but not quite catching fire?
Can this place be something, some space that is a place I can, that my community can grow up to be well in?
I will need to listen more carefully!
Are we there yet?
A journey towards making ‘place’ means more.
Photos
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[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
[Image not included in the current archive. Images may be included in the future.]
Related:
- Wendy Elford (author)
- 2025 (year)
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