a clear flowing yarra (Patreon)

Harry Sadler's new book 'A Clear Flowing Yarra' is love letter to the Birrarung river. The river has long been a huge part of my life, so i was happy to meet with him to talk about it late last year. You might like to get a copy of the book, it's a beautiful thing, it's a deep meditation and a rallying cry. Harry is a very smart and thoughtful guy, deeply connected to ecologies and to living things. I'm learning alot from the book, it's turning up the dial on my love for the river, and everything it supports.

"A MIGHTY BEAST OF THE ECOLOGY

When I met Sam Wallman the first thing he said was ‘I have something for you’.

‘Oh!’ I replied excitedly as I saw the poster tube under his arm. ‘Is it your “Make the Yarra swimmable” cartoon?’

‘No,’ he laughed, half apologetic and half delighted as he handed me a rolled-up poster-sized print of his cartoon ‘Guide to the Yarra River’s beats’. The cartoon winds sinuously through a rainbow from warm orange in one corner to lush violet in another – a ‘melty rainbow map’ in Sam’s description – tracing a history of illicit sexual encounters along the river’s banks: ‘Lie back and imagine an ancient Gondwanan forest’ one panel advises, the text encircling two men engaged in oral sex as the river bends past them. 

Later in our walk along the river Sam would recount his experiences as a gay man, cruising ‘many times with deep intimacy with strangers by this river, picnics and drinking, then just trying to understand the physical attributes of it, spiritual attributes, the history of it, the industrial history as well – there’s so many aspects that I love about it’.

Sam was modest and self-effacing about his work during our forty-five-minute conversation, but his intricately detailed cartoons display deep thought and depth of research, as well as a welcome political and social earnestness: time and again after reading one of Sam’s cartoons I find myself filled with hope at the possibilities of the future. ‘If we were able to swim in the river,’ his Swimmable Yarra cartoon says, ‘that would represent the cherry on top of the restoration efforts. Because it can’t be healed in isolation. The river is a drill-core sample of the broader ecological state. It’s a barometer, a feedback loop, and a vein – supporting the lives of millions of creatures and countless ecosystems.’

At the top of the cartoon a person – short, dark hair, small gold-hoop earring – swims freestyle in the river. The water flows around and into them, the figure’s open mouth like a bay drawing in the river. I told Sam how much I liked that detail, of the river flowing into the swimmer’s mouth. He laughed and said, ‘I know, my friend was like “Man don’t have it going into the mouth, that’s too visceral”. I was like “If we can’t even cop the idea of it going into someone’s mouth …”’ He trailed off, the question of the limits of what we’re willing to imagine left hanging in the air.

Sam’s passionate about the river: at one point in our conversation he recounted how ‘on the weekend this fella was talking about how dirty the river was and I jumped to action straight away’. Adopting a comically distraught voice, he relived his castigation of the man: ‘“It’s silt! It’s floating silt! Leave it alone!”’ I told him about how I’d had to unlearn negative attitudes towards the river since moving to Melbourne. ‘Oh, it’s so offensive!’ he replied. ‘Even from a settler perspective, this is a mighty beast of the ecology, an ancient part of this colonised land. It’s kind of insult to injury to shit on it, really.’

He asked me about my upbringing, so I told him about growing up in Canberra, and swimming in rivers there because the sea was so far away. ‘Yeah I was a river kid,’ he said. ‘I’m from Geelong and the Barwon River was my … as a little kid I’d ride my bike by it every day, then as a teenager I’d smoke weed by it every day, it had different appeals to me through my life. I remember as a teenager my mum and her friends being like “Do you prefer the ocean or the river?” – they were chatting among themselves. Well both are amazing, it’s obviously not a binary, but I do feel myself drawn to rivers.’

I’d asked Sam to meet with no real idea of what we might do or where we might go, other than it seemed apt to meet somewhere along the river. We ended up crossing the Johnston Street Bridge from the Abbotsford Convent and then stepping onto the walking track that follows the left bank of the river – part of a longer track that takes three or four hours to walk in its totality and is my favourite urban bushwalk in Melbourne or just about anywhere else, the same track I’d walked back and forth so many times searching for Salvatore the seal. Sam had never been this way before and he was immediately thrilled – he jokingly described the path as ‘the DVD special feature’ of the river. Almost immediately we spotted a pair of tawny frogmouths roosting below the track; a little further on we passed by a man taking photos of a kookaburra. We talked about how cities can be biodiversity hotspots, often unbeknown to their human inhabitants. ‘You can take heart from that,’ Sam said. ‘It’s all a kind of resistance, really. All these animals.’

We spoke about the restoration of the river, the revegetation that’s occurred in the last few decades. ‘It’s pretty remarkable,’ he said. ‘It’s so recent, our parents would remember it being deeply maligned and also totally locked up because industry would have been right up to the banks. I feel like we even take for granted the fact that we can even just walk along it without a cyclone fence in our way … Like it’s a little glimpse of the commons, really … I feel like in the same way that people understand something about private property being a really foul concept in their understanding of the beach, even my dad gets so arced up if council puts some awnings on the beach or something like that, there’s a bit of that with the river too, it allows people to imagine a different sort of public ownership.’

I asked him about his own relationship with the river. ‘If I feel mentally unwell or anything I find movement has always helped,’ he said, ‘so cycling along the river has always been my default if I feel crusty or crazy or anything … you kind of lose your body in some way, even lose your mind if you’re sweating and your heart beats fast enough, it’s great.’ I asked him if he’d ever swum in the river. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said. ‘Intentionally and unintentionally. I swum in it actually not far from Galatea Point years ago and didn’t get sick thankfully. I’ve swum in it many times at Laughing Waters. That’s cheating, though, ’cos that’s very far upstream. Warburton – icy swims up there. My brother and I were up there last year in between Melbourne lockdowns, and we were swimming in Warburton and we found an old [tobacco] pipe in the margins, on the side of the banks, so very cool. Now we share this as a memento. And then I was a member of the kayak club, the INCC [Ivanhoe Northcote Canoe Club], and obviously stacked it a couple of times learning. Which is always what I remind my friends, ’cos I would always take them out with me kayaking and be like “You will fall in at the start”, and if you tell people you want to go swimming in the Yarra they’d never do it but they’re somehow willing to fall in accidentally, so see? You didn’t get crook. Just keep your mouth shut … It’s an act of love to swim in it I reckon at this stage, rather than a natural act, but I think that will change.’

It can also be an act of pleasure, and of leisure: there are no swimming lanes in a river, no carefully measured fifty metre lengths, no lines marked on the bottom. In the UK, swimming in a lake or a river or the sea is sometimes called ‘wild swimming’, but a more inviting name might be simply ‘recreational swimming’. In the last couple of years of working from home since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic I’ve found that I’ve been able to reclaim some of my leisure time – the vaunted ‘eight hours’ recreation’ that increasingly seems to have become the forgotten part of the eight-hour day. Of course for many people in precarious work eight hours of recreation – let alone eight hours’ rest – remains an impossible aspiration, but I want to believe that the glimpse of another way of living that we got at the start of the pandemic still remains, and can still be seized upon if enough people realise it.

‘Another part of the eight-hour movement that I try to remind myself about,’ Sam told me, ‘is that they wanted time to organise as well.’ As he said this we stopped to try to help an ant that was curled up on the dusty track and in danger of being stepped on. ‘I’m always thankful that they’ve sent us this eight-hour day through time, more leisure time, and then I remember that they also wanted us to organise in that time as well. We also have the time to fight for the river because of the eight-hour day too.’

Thinking about recreation along the Yarra, I told Sam about the community of swimmers that has grown up around Deep Rock, inspired by the Yarra Yabbies; how you can go there in the morning before work or the evening after work, or on the weekend, and there will be people having a dip. ‘And a chat as well,’ Sam pointed out, ‘because that’s another lever. You can fight people’s loneliness in this [swimmable Yarra] campaign too, and if someone did get sick or if there was visible pollution there’d be a natural base to push back and call their MP or whatever … Imagine if we had communities like that dotted along all the [river], like if each neighbourhood had a little swimming club.’

At the start of our conversation Sam borrowed the Simpsons neologism ‘crisitunity’ – something that’s a crisis, but also an opportunity – and at the end of our conversation he revisited it: ‘[The river’s a] Rorschach test really, you and I probably look at it differently, let alone some Tory … And look, we’ve been saying if they want to make it cleaner for their property prices that’s okay too, whatever gets us there. We’re only gonna fix it if we deal with the structural shit, though, obviously, because it’s so connected to everything. That’s why in the poster I drew all those forces flowing into it as streams ’cos that is how it is, all these different issues are in that river; it’s not polluted by the industry but it’s polluted by its other stuff … I’m so tempted by the shortcuts. But no, if we do just make it swimmable we won’t have used this crisitunity.’

I often think of the English poet John Clare, who documented the privatisation of common land in the earliest days of industrial capitalism. The river, too, like other urban rivers, has historically been privatised: even if the water itself was publicly owned, pollution from private industry so befouled it that it became effectively fenced off, unwelcoming and unloved by Melburnians. But the Yarra is not that river any more – especially in the wake of its popularity during Melbourne’s lockdowns. ‘Yeah, it’s the commons,’ Sam agreed. ‘It is a portal into some other way of having a city and sharing a space. ’Cos people get along [by it] … So maybe this is the frontier of the fight against capitalism still. [This is] such a cartoonist’s thought but I’m like “How do we link arms with the river and picket line or something?”’

Sam’s own relationship with the river continues to change and grow: ‘It pierces the veil somehow,’ he said as we walked along the track above the water. ‘Even a month ago my partner and I were dog-sitting in Heidelberg and we went to some brewery and we were coming back after dark with the dog and we decided to walk along the river, and I guess I’m my mother’s son, I usually don’t go to the river at night. You hear one story of someone getting garrotted while cycling …! I don’t even know if that ever happened, but “stranger danger”, I’m just probably not going to go down … But we walked along and it was just so beautiful in the darkness, just the low light and the different things that the low light highlighted, and the sound – it’s very loud … I saw it from a completely different perspective and it just unlocked it in a new way … We don’t live at a time when people have a very sacred outlook, but I feel like there’s some sublime character to the river.’

We finished our walk, accidentally but appropriately, on Yarra Street, completing a loop from the convent and back again. We said a slightly awkward farewell, and in parting Sam concluded: ‘Everyone loves [the river] and respects it, they just don’t know it yet.’"

- Excerpt from 'A Clear Flowing Yarra. Visions of Melbourne's river as it is and could be' by Harry Sadler.

Tony Birch, one of my favourite writers, said "a story of beauty flows through each page of this glorious book". Tony Birch wrote Ghost River, which I also rly recommend, it won the victorian premier’s literary award for Indigenous writing and is an absolute banger. Tony made this free, self-guided one hour walking tour of the river, which is a really nice thing to do with a friend and a couple of tinnies i reckon https://acca.melbourne/six-walks-episode-one-tony-birch/ 

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