By Carol Altmann

Phew, that was close. Two of Warrnambool’s oldest street trees have been temporarily spared from being chopped down by the Warrnambool City Council this weekend, but the fight is far from over.

The two, 115-year-old Australian banyan trees on the corner of, yes, Banyan St and Raglan Parade are not yet saved, but thanks to people power, the pause button has been pressed.

Let’s look at what just happened and what happens next.

What happened was the council falsely and arrogantly believed that it could destroy these two magnificent trees that have been alive longer than any person on the planet and nobody would really care.

 

It also believed that consulting the public meant putting a media release on its website, sending this to the local paper, and contacting a few nearby property owners – all just 10 days before the chainsaws moved in.

Lastly, it hoped that we would blindly accept that these trees had to be chopped down because they were causing car accidents, that they were bubbling up the footpath and that the whole avenue of trees would actually look better if these two trees were gone.

To say the council was wrong on every single count is an understatement.

More than 2000 people signed an online petition within four days to stop this massacre. The petition, started by local Scarlett Patrick, is still going strong.

People were furious. They were furious because their heritage was about to be ripped out (again), that our precious old trees were being treated with contempt, that nobody had a chance to offer an opinion or an alternative, that not one single elected councillor was jumping up and down in outrage, and that the justifications being rolled out just didn’t make sense.

The trees, as we all know, are not causing car accidents at a big intersection that has traffic lights. They are not causing drivers to rear-end each other, or to turn too soon, or too late.

VicRoads knows this and I asked them, just to be sure, if they had expressed concerns to the council about the old trees.

They hadn’t.

 

What VicRoads did do, however, was offer to pay for a new footpath if the council decided to pull out the trees:

“VicRoads (Regional Roads Victoria) is responsible for the maintenance of the footpath in the Princes Highway median, and has, as a result of the Council’s plans to remove the trees, agreed to fix any damage to the footpath,” a spokeswoman said via email.

The footpath under the big trees is getting rough, just like those at the Warrnambool Botanic Gardens, but there are many ways to improve this and, just to be on the safe side, there is another, perfectly flat footpath just 2o metres away on the other side of the road.

Locals know this, they can see it for themselves.

(They can also see the broken stump of a traffic and pedestrian light that has been sitting there for weeks, wrapped in orange safety tape, waiting to be replaced.)

Picking up on the angry mood, the council has now switched tack.

You’ve got it all wrong folks! The priority was not about traffic accidents and footpaths, but actually improving the full avenue of Australian banyans/Moreton Bay figs along Raglan Parade.

The original media release has been taken down from the council website (see above), but this is the opening line of a statement sent to me this week:

“Council’s intention in proposing to remove these trees was to address issues associated with aesthetics of the boulevard which had been impacted by heavy pruning of the two trees as part of power line and signal clearance works, other considerations included pedestrian access and visibility at the intersection.”

So you prune the trees so harshly that they look ugly, then you get rid of them because, hey, they look ugly.

Oh boy, we are back in George Orwell territory again.

The good news is that the council says it will now consult more broadly. When and how, we still don’t know, but it has decided to bundle the issue into its response to another petition, received in April this year.

That petition, signed by 19 residents, asked to have some native trees planted on the median strip in the southern end of Banyan St, between Timor and Merri streets.

Thanks to Scarlett Patrick, you, and more than 2000 other people, these 19 residents now have a whole lot more clout and the two Australian Banyan trees have a second chance.

 

More broadly, the council has been given a wake up notice that people are watching, that they do care, and that we need a better policy on how we manage our precious urban forest.

The Lorax would be proud.

[You can sign the petition here.]

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I am so glad that the postal vote on same-sex marriage happened while I was living here in Warrnambool, because I needed to make peace with this town.

Growing up here in the 70s, 80 and 90s was not easy for those who knew they didn’t fit the mainstream, but couldn’t articulate why, other than knowing to talk about it would lead to trouble.

Even for those of us who had long family ties here, there was a pervasive sense of not belonging to the main tribe, of being an outsider.

I used my humour to get through my years at Warrnambool High School when I knew I had an attraction to girls, but didn’t know what that meant, or what it was, or how it would be, and it scared me and I knew I had to hide by fumbling my way through a string of boyfriends and side-stepping the deb ball.

I have since learned that we were all hiding – all of us – Glenn, David, Michelle, Julie, Damien, me – there are probably many others, because to not hide was to face exclusion, to feel ashamed, to be hurt by those who were stronger and more powerful.

Most of us had to run away from Warrnambool to find out who we were. I was gone for 25 years.

This is why the postal vote on same-sex marriage penetrated so deep into the psyche and the skin of those who were at the centre of the poll: we have been there before, except this time it wasn’t just a small country town judging us, but the entire nation, as to whether we were worthy of the same rights as everybody else.

And that is why the significance of this vote went well beyond the right to marry, which is something many LGBTQI people still feel ambivalent about. This was a vote on equality and whether, at last, we could stop feeling ashamed and excluded.

Last Wednesday at 10am, we all held our breath.

And then came the sweet release of a YES.

YES. YES. YES. YES.

Two thirds of our corner of the world voted YES.

YES pulls up windows and let’s the breeze blow in.

YES opens the doors on our hearts.

YES turns down the volume on hate and ramps up the volume on kindness.

No wonder most of us spontaneously cried when the result came through – including warhorses like Senator Penny Wong and writer David Marr – because a “NO” vote would have been unbearable.

The temptation for many of us living in Warrnambool was to head to Melbourne and await the results on the steps of the State Library together with thousands of others, then – we hoped – party long into the night.

But as my friend Bill Abrahams said later, “it was important to be here” and he was right.

It was important on Wednesday night to be able to stand in what was, when I was growing up, Brebner’s Paint Shop – now the Dart and Marlin bar – and wave a huge rainbow flag while people from all walks of life in Warrnambool joined in the celebration.

Twenty years ago, maybe even ten, this would have been inconceivable. Somebody would have been hurt.

As horrific as the postal vote process was, I am glad it happened, because it gave Warrnambool a chance to grow in ways that I suspect will become even more apparent over time. From the rainbow flag flying above the Warrnambool City Council, to the extraordinary events at the temporary Haven space within the Warrnambool Art Gallery, to the ongoing presence of Yumcha at Brophy, we have shown we were ready for this.

A few days after the vote was announced, Bill posted a photo on Facebook of him sitting in a Warrnambool bar just after 2am. His hair is in an Elvis coiff and he is wearing pearls and a fake fox fur while, behind him, a bouncer dressed in black leans on the bar, gazing off into the middle distance.

“Donna please take a photo. It’s 2:20am, I’m wearing my pearls out in Warrnambool and I haven’t even been gay bashed!” he wrote.

This is the new Warrnambool – a better Warrnambool – and we can all live with that.