Worm time
At the end of the year when all the pressures of work and family collide sometimes the best place to go is underground. Imagine you’re an earthworm deep, deep below CERES in Brunswick East, tunnelling slowly upwards your experience of time is relative to the layers of the Earth you’re crawling through – this is worm time.
You’re starting deep; thirty million years deep, wriggling through Miocene to Pliocene in sediments laid down on ocean beds and through uncountable floods. Changes are almost imperceptible, specks of pollen echo ancient beech forest, traces of charcoal speack of bushfires and fossils fragments imply long extinct insects and animals.
Up through new eucalypt and acacia pollens and ash layers you sense the great drying as we slither into the Pleistocene, up through cracks in hardened lava flows that will form the bed of the Merri Creek. For a long while this is the way things are and then they’re not.
The bluestone that normally lies in uniform seams is smashed and scattered. Suddenly you’re crawling into the Anthropocene, through the 1800’s when the dark, heavy stone was blasted and quarried to build the old Melbourne Gaol and laneways of a new city.
From here we wriggle upwards into the twentieth century and into the rubbish tip that fills the exhausted quarry – we navigate through a chaos of rusting Holden engine blocks, long dead refrigerators, mattress inner springs, crumbling melamine furniture, Bata sneakers, broken Fisher Price toys and plastic shopping bags, so many plastic shopping bags.
A piece of worm-time is missing here; dug out with the rock are traces of the Wurundjeri, the thousands of layers of ash representing fires used by farmers to manage bush into grasslands for hunting and gardens for planting Murrnong – passed over, thrown aside in the hurry to build.
Back in the landfill layer reaching down and spreading through the soil cap that the rubbish hides under you can feel fine root hairs tickle against your skin. These are the roots of the first trees planted at CERES over forty years ago when local people began to take care of this broken piece of land.
Wriggling up through the fill and into the new millenium you’re in living soils built over just a couple of decades with ton upon ton of hand-turned compost full of familiar faces – millipedes, slaters, springtails, ciliates, protozoa, nematodes, fungi and delicious bacteria.
Finally the surface and the present – you pop out amongst the garden beds, gums and acacias, bushes, grasses and fruit trees, herbs and veggies, farmers and school children, parents and toddlers, walkers and riders.
Life attracts life; each shovelful of compost, each new plant creates homes and food for more creatures that eat and poop and die and are incorporated back into the soil with the bark and leaf litter.
In places all over the city worm-time reveals it is possible to change, to add new layers to our story – to fall in love with the Earth again.
Have a great break
Chris
Our last delivery for 2024 is this Tuesday 24th December, our first delivery for 2025 is Tuesday 7th of January.
