Buruwan park was a pocket of greenery near the Rozelle Bay light rail station, the park sat between the light rail line, the Crescent, City West Link and White's creek. Buruwan park had some beautiful old Morton Bay fig trees that provided shade for people waiting for the light rail. Recently, this park was destroyed to make way for the Westconnex, a sprawling motorway system with an interchange right where Buruwan park stood. The fig trees are now gone, but luckily before the bulldozers arrived I was able to dig up some bottlebrush trees and replant them somewhere else. The Bottlebrush had particular importance to me as I planted them with a loved one who is no longer here.
Seeing this park destroyed, I started thinking about how we form bonds with specific trees in our neighborhood. There are trees we meet everyday and form relationships with, something about their limbs sticks in the mind. In our current state of aimless walks during the pandemic-lockdown these trees seem particularly important, and the may provide oases in the summer heat, or representations of people we knew, or maybe assume magical qualities like yowies.
It seems dificult for the political class to understand our relationships with these specific trees. When the bureacratic decision is tree removal, the consolation is often transactional in nature: "we'll swap these trees for others which we promise to plant in the future." While planting more new trees is great, these are not the same trees which we become attached to.
What makes the Crescent figs destruction so disturbing is that it's hard to know what it was in service of. Facing climate change, our cities should become cool and green with lots of public transport. But Burawan Park was removed to make way for more hot, lifeless, concrete motorways. The community made it fairly clear it was opposed to Westconnex, but this movement was basically ignored by the State government.
Recently some new neighbors moved into an old house in our street. This house was owned by a longtime friend, who was elderly and had to move into a care home. In the front garden there were two mature trees, a Magnolia and a Camellia which were both about 20-30 years old. I remember particularly the Magnolia, being shocked every spring by the incredible white and pink flowers. One of the first acts of home improvement the new owners performed was to fell these two trees. The limbs and trunks were stacked out on the road in big piles. I think the felling of the Magnolia was especially shocking because of what the tree represents. The tree came to embody not just the life of the tree, but also the life of our friend who used to live there, the memories of people who used to live in the street and be in our community, and my own younger self.
