shapeofthings | A little slice of history (Reply)

Picture removed due to theiving bastards. Give me back my bandwidth!

Cities sometimes hold their ghosts, too close to heart for real estate to sunder. Sometimes this town still dreams the past goes walking down these well-worn streets and even the new-comers remember. Greatness echoes in this empty space, full of tales of dashing and daring! There's such sadnes, hanging, over glory lost, and dreams still tethered to this weary ground full of stories. When you walk by raise your gaze a moment from the path beneath your feet; stop to wonder at the emptiness you're passing. For history can teach so much of sense of place, lend character to suburban waste - stop a moment, please. Don't hurry by, but step inside and take a moment to understand how it ever came to this...

Milton, just three blocks away, this relic of lost glory: the Milton Tennis Centre, built in 1915 closed in the 90's. I remember my mother watching Davis Cup and ladies matches on the weathered courts. I remember when it ended, when they moved to Hope Island. When I moved here in '98 the centre lay in waiting, caught up in time and closeted by the growing city. They tore the stands down in '02, so they say, but I couldn't tell you - I know they were there, I know they've been gone a long time, but time moves apart form the living, beating city there.

I stopped by, just the other day, on the way to nowhere in that big a hurry. Stepping around the fences, behind the trees, where it hits you: the waiting emptiness, half- demolished, petrified in decomposition. The grasses slide and shimmer in the breeze, pushing down into the hidden soil and breathing life into the quiet air.

Places like this hold so many stories; the city remembers and old men talk about the day the place went under in the '74 floods and that grand final that the nation stopped to watch. Places like this remind a city who it is. In cities, the landscape forms connected memories, and in the country the mountains keep their stories. Only in the endlessness on suburbia does identity wash and fade with the seasons, dressing with the fashions in that endless dance of decay and renewal.

We need our history. We need the stories to wind through the alleys and carry on the wind. Let the land breathe our passing and echo our stories in days to come. Stop a while. Remember.