Shed

The new freeway is being built at the end of our street. Government propaganda proudly calls it the Missing Link. No one in the neighbourhoods had any say in the freeway. Community consultation, a few years ago, was an exercise in telling the community what will happen. That is how bureaucracy crushes political action: hold public consultations that aren’t consultations. Most likely the freeway will go underground beneath the end of our street, so that will be quiet. Not that we’re sure, as the planning maps are vague about exact locations of tunnel exits and entrances. Perhaps they still don’t know. There is nothing about elevated roadways over our house, so that’s a plus. In fact, small details are not in the big propaganda. For those, you need to attend wintry council meetings or read the small print at the end of Missing Link emails. One such detail was announced obscurely this week. The sports reserve two blocks from our house will be a work area. We knew this already, but not that it will be fenced off with timber, becoming location for an acoustic shed. Jokes were shared over dinner about rock gigs at the new Acoustic Shed, how we could make a mint selling merchandise in the street. Only it’s not that kind of shed. It’s a shed like the one next to St Paul’s Cathedral, where Town Hall Station is being built underground. (“Perhaps that will eventually be the new Festival Hall.”) We try to imagine a world where large trucks and excavators drive around nearby at 3 pm but we sleep soundly because the huge vehicles are all in the acoustic shed. Slumberland! Another minor detail emerged over dinner, the TBM (Tunnel Boring Machine). Actually, the government doesn’t have the TBM yet because it’s still being designed in Germany and will take a year and a half to be shipped to Melbourne, home of the Missing Link. Things could be quiet for a while. Our theory is the same as during the non-consultation era: they don’t know what’s under the Banyule flood plain. Emails say the TBM can bore deeper, weirder, further, which is an impressive amount of boring, especially if it comes from Germany. But maybe they’ve discovered major details about Yarra flood silt and bedrock that haven’t reached the small print yet. When it arrives, the very hungry caterpillar will probably be put together piece-by-piece somewhere like the acoustic shed. TBM TBC. The assembled machine will eat holes all the way from Greensborough to Bulleen, keeping nimbys quiet while munching inexorably 40 metres below their backyards. There is still nothing in the small print about all the extra lanes to be built on the Eastern Freeway as the Bulleen end of the Missing Link vomits out east and west. Just as was raised by some neighbours back in the day; the day of the non-consultations, I mean.