A Year Down the Drain: Walking in Styx Creek, January to December

By Mark MacLean

The bestselling book by Mark MacLean tells the story of his year walking a concrete drain in suburban Newcastle with his cairn terrier, Jambo.

Equal parts diary, inquiry and observation, A Year Down the Drain invites you on a journey with the author into Newcastle's watery underworld.

‘An enchanting read’ (Peter Beale, Newcastle Herald)

‘Completely delightful’ (Richard Fidler, ABC Radio National)

‘The Gilbert White of the Styx’ (Bob Adamson, poet)

Listen to Mark interviewed by Richard Fidler on ABC Radio's Conversations program.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Hunter Press
• Release date: Oct 10, 2015
• ISBN: 9780992488550

Mark MacLean

Born in Cumbria, UK, Mark MacLean has lived in Australia (Alice Springs, Newcastle and Lightning Ridge) for more than half his life. With family on both sides of the world, Mark is endlessly drawn to the subject of identity and the idea of home.Mark has been published in newspapers and magazines. His book "A Year Down the Drain: Walking in Styx Creek January to December" (also published by The Hunter Press) topped the independent bookseller charts in December 2011. His memoir "Five Boxes" won the Zeferelli's People's category in the 2016 Lakeland Book of the Year awards.

Book preview

A year down the drain

Walking in Styx Creek, January to December

Mark MacLean

The Hunter Press

The Hunter Press

PO Box 671

Hamilton NSW 2303

Australia

w: markmaclean.com.au

e: [e-mail]

w: hamiltonnorth.wordpress.com

This electronic book is © Mark MacLean, 2013

The printed book was first published in 2011, © Mark Maclean

ISBN 978 0 9924885 5 0

All rights reserved. No part of this ebook may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. The Copyright Act 1968 (the Act) allows a maximum of one chapter or 10 per cent of this book, whichever is the greater, to be photocopied by any educational institution for its education purposes provided that the educational institution (or body that administers it) has given a remuneration notice to Copyright Agency Limited (CAL) under the Act.

Cover: ‘Morning, Styx Creek’, Christine Bruderlin 2011

Original Book Design, typesetting, map and illustrations by Christine Bruderlin

Printed by Ligare Pty Ltd, Sydney

Contents

Introduction

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

August

September

October

November

December

Acknowledgements

It has been frequently said that a city that is progressing outgrows its drains just as a boy outgrows his clothes.

— John W. Armstrong, Pipelines and People, Hunter District Water Board, 1967

All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was.

— Toni Morrison

Styx Creek, Chaucer Street Drain and Throsby Creek

Introduction

^

I like the seasons. I like watching the world around me change. For many years I’ve owned a copy of Gilbert White’s The natural history and antiquities of Selbourne. White was an English country parson who wrote about the world in and around his parish; his book was published in the same year as the French Revolution and has never been out of print. I’m not sure if it’s an English thing or not but the idea of the classically educated parson who jots down his observations and keeps a sketchbook and watercolours in his leather satchel so that he can record the first appearance of bearded orchids or the ripening of crabapples is something that’s oddly appealing to me. British author and fellow Cumbrian Melvyn Bragg calls these types permitted amateurs, which is a term I rather like. Having said that, I’m not a very good observer of the natural world; I like the idea of recording all this stuff but I’m not a systematic person and only keep lists sporadically. I just looked in my Filofax and found two bird lists recorded while walking around different places; the first is headed Gloucester Tops, 26/2/05 and the second Bellingen, 17/11/08. There are no other lists in there though I know that I’ve made them. Where are they? Gilbert White would know. I’m also rubbish at drawing and so, if it weren’t for this project, there’d be no Natural history and antiquities of Hamilton North.

If the idea of strolling around Hamilton North like an English country parson was one side of the motivational coin, the other side was the getting of a dog. In spite of the kids begging us to, for the first dozen years of their lives we’d resisted getting anything bigger or more inconvenient than a goldfish or a couple of chooks. Then, last year, we finally cracked. So Jambo, a cairn terrier, came into our lives and of course, though the kids had promised to walk him and groom him and feed him and all the rest of it, it fell to the adults – and mostly me – to become the dog walker.

Walking the dog’s a great way to re-see the neighbourhood, though I quickly tired of criss-crossing the grids of Clyde Street, Boreas Road, Chatham Road, Broadmeadow Road and the little streets in between. The one walk I never tired of was the scramble down the concrete banking into Styx Creek before heading upstream towards New Lambton or downstream towards Islington. Here I could let Jambo off the lead, and here I got to see a part of the suburb that’s rarely visited by anyone who isn’t a kid, or at least a kid with a spray can and a bottle bong.

The creek was one of the first places I took my own children to when we first moved to Hamilton North in 1998. There were sticks to be raced in the water and dams to be built and rocks to be dropped from a great height to make a huge splash. Its attraction was instant after the blandness of Hamilton, where we’d been renting. In Hamilton the only wildlife I ever saw was feral: sparrows, collared doves, Indian minas, cats, dogs, people. Styx Creek is totally different, a watery corridor that leads to the old gasworks, itself a contaminated and derelict area that’s become a haven for lizards and snakes and birds. Every day in the creek you can see herons, egrets, ducks, teal, wagtails and flycatchers, wrens, silvereye, hawks, kookaburras, ibis, magpie-larks and cormorants. I’ve seen night herons, bitterns and dotterels, big old blue-tongues and skittery skinks. In September the channel-billed cuckoos gather to eat the deep red fig berries in the trees in Richardson Park, while sneakily laying their eggs in the nests of the crows and the magpies and the currawongs.

If, during the course of a conversation, the subject of walking in the creek crops up there’s often a pause before people realise where I’m talking about and then they say, Oh, the drain!, which is sad, to me at least. I’ve got to be careful here: I don’t mean to sound like I’m somehow more in tune with nature and the world by calling the waterway a creek rather than a drain. The drain is what it is to anyone who’s grown up here, and people are fond of its draininess. I’ve come across blogs that celebrate drains and so I know that other people love them. I just don’t like the word drain applied to my bit of waterway. It doesn’t feel right.

I don’t know my Newcastle history, but I can guess that – like dozens of other towns and cities built on estuaries and floodplains – it’s been through any number of catastrophes to do with water over the last couple of centuries. As soon as they were able to, people found an engineering solution to get rid of the water. And that’s what a drain does: it gets rid of something that you don’t want. Drains take effluent away from industrial sites, liquid filth away from slums and pus away from suppurating sores. And at some point 
Newcastle’s city fathers looked at their meandering creeks and saw them not as places that enriched their environment but as a problem, or at the very least the source of a problem. On maps from the late nineteenth century the waterways are still marked as creeks but by the early twentieth century the labels have changed. They became drains.

If, after reading this book, you’re driving through 
Hamilton North on your way to somewhere and you find yourself involuntarily glancing over the railings of the 
Chatham Road bridge to see what’s happening in the creek – if the tide’s high or low, if there’s a build-up of litter, if there are herons or a clutch of ducklings paddling in the water, or if there’s a bloke walking with a dog – then it’s been worth it.

Names

In the early drafts of this book I used all kinds of names for the different parts of the creek. The creek has steep concrete sides, which I’ve called the creek bank. At the bottom of the bank there’s often a step, which I’ve called the sill. Between the sills is a flattish surface: the creek bed. And at the very centre is a small channel, no more that two feet wide, along which the water flows when the creek isn’t in flood. I’ve called this permanent watercourse the beck, because where I come from (Cumbria, in England) that’s what we call the small watercourses that get called streams and brooks in other parts of the world.

Styx Creek itself isn’t really a natural watercourse at all. It’s had a few names over the years but Styx Creek is what it’s called now and it would be perverse to call it something else. There’s a little channel that used to flow through 
Gregson Park, across Samdon Street (by the Donald Street lights) and then into (modern day) Styx Creek. This is shown as the River Styx in maps from the end of the nineteenth century but at some point it lost its river status, even lost its creek status, and at some point became (on Hunter Water maps) Chaucer Street drain.