<
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-01-07/melbourne-was-built-on-a-swamp-flood-history/101610910>
'There's a scene in
Monty Python and the Holy Grail where the lord of Swamp
Castle explains to his son that everyone thought he was daft to build a castle
in a swamp, but he did it anyway.
It sank into the swamp.
"So I built a second one," he says. "That sank into the swamp. So I built a
third. That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. But the fourth
one stayed up."
You can see where I'm going with this.
Melbourne hasn't exactly sunk into a swamp, but it certainly was built on one.
And it's taken an awful lot of work to prevent it from going the same way as
Swamp Castles one, two and three.
One of the first Europeans to reach the area, surveyor Charles Grimes, wrote in
his diary in 1803 of travelling by boat up what we now call the Yarra River.
"Saw a large lagoon at a distance. Went over the hill to a large swamp," he
wrote.
"The river appears to rise to the height of eight or ten feet at times by wreck
on the trees."
The flood-prone landscape was no mystery to the Wurundjeri and Bunurong people,
who had successfully managed their traditional lands for tens of thousands of
years.
And those swampy features loomed large time and time again, in the first 50 or
so years of Melbourne's existence.'
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
