couch spot 1.1
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Image credit: Dominic Sargent
There are a lot of places between Footscray and Melbourne CBD that don’t exist anymore, like the original mouth of the Birrarung River, the wetlands that surrounded it, the encampments of the early 20th century that lived on its dredged mudflats, the warehouse raves that took root in the factories that replaced the encampments, the squat raves that found a window of opportunity after that. We don’t have the herd of goats that lived, herded by no-one, on Kororoit Creek, or the stray cat family at Dynon Auto Wreckers, now wrecked. We don’t have the couch at the couch spot next to Sims Street rail bridge, and we don’t have Canal Siding, now a non-place, next to the old steel terminal, another now-non-place closer to West Melbourne.
Canal Siding was a generation of punks’ first freight hopout. There was a cluster of willow trees next to the tracks that made the perfect jungle to sit in, whether you wanted to catch out that night or just hang and watch trains. There were the skeletal shells of some warehouses next to it where I have met up, hooked up, broken up, and made up with various people, gotten up with, dropped off, spotted for, and intro’d others, all in the steel train’s orbit. It was drenched in the permanent amber glow of sodium lamps and generous shadows. There was just enough action to make the yard dynamic, but slow enough to get comfy.
Like all train yards, when it rained, Canal Siding remembered that it was a marshland. It’s gone now, replaced by the bones of another urban renewal precinct and a bunch of hyperspace bypasses on giant columns, that the next generation of punks are no doubt already figuring out how to get inside of. The steel train leaves from South Dynon now – and sometimes, to maintain its mystique, North Dynon. Everything around there is temp fencing and jackhammers. A good jungle should feel like a bird hide; the closest we have to the old willow tree now is a half k down the way at the couch spot at Sims Street bridge over the Maribyrnong. Close enough to other ghost places nearby where you can still hear the rave – wastelands, Hot Shots, the old shoe factory – from that point in time when the same breakcore DJ would somehow always be starting his 90 minute set right when your wrong combo of drugs were coming on.