Peta Clancy

here merri merri lies

I live as an uninvited guest on Wurundjeri Country near merri merri (Merri Creek) in the suburb now known as Coburg. I have resided here for the past 25 years which is an insignificant amount of time compared with the thousands of generations Wurundjeri people have lived on and cared for Country and I acknowledge their continuous connection.

Black cockatoos screeched overhead, and the bellbirds gave the bush a softer ring…the creek widened occasionally into rich alluvial flats and the water was of a sweet taste…there were platypus in the creek…but the shouts of the measurers and the noise of their survey chains frightened them”.[1]

In 1837 European perceptions of land ownership were imposed on Wurundjeri Country when Robert Hoddle began to carve the ‘land’ into box like sections of 640 acres.[2] This marked the beginning of the degradation of the waterway and disruption of cultural sites along merri merri. here merri merri lies explores merri merri at Coburg Lake – an artificial lake that was formed in 1915 when the rocks in the creek bed were used to build a wall (near Newlands Bridge) forcing the creek water to back up and form the lake. This changed the trajectory of the creek and in turn flooded thousands of years of culture, history, and memory.

To create the photographs, I worked collaboratively and performatively with and on Country. I returned to the same location on Country with photographs I had previously created. I shared the photographs with Country before attaching them to a frame, cutting into them, and rephotographing them to create the final layered images which explore Country from multiple time frames, perspectives, histories, as well as acknowledge the cultural memory still here.

As I photographed at Coburg Lake, the resident family of black swans glided in and out of my view across the lake, descendants of which have lived here for thousands of years. I imagined the water level in the creek rising, then falling, then rising again swallowing the rocks and stones. I thought of the narrative of the flow of the creek prior to colonisation. here merri merri lies reimagines a place where the past flows into the future once more.

Thank you to Wurundjeri Elders, Aunty Julieanne Axford and Aunty Gail Smith, from the Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung Cultural Heritage Aboriginal Corporation for your permissions for me to photograph this beautiful part of Wurundjeri Country.

Peta Clancy January 2024

[1] Richard Broome. Coburg Between Two Creeks, (Second Edition, Coburg Historical Society, Pascoe Vale South, 2001), 34.

[2] ibid