An Open Letter to Hepburn Shire Council,
A healing place, a town and country where you can recoup…
I love Daylesford. I lived there for three and a half years and now part time. The shape of the town is just right, a bit like the bed chosen by Goldilocks.
The train doesn’t get there directly, and it can only be reached by Woodend or Ballan (and even there at uncomfortable bus times, though Ballan is closer). The train tracks still exist. Why doesn’t anyone make a push to have a direct Melbourne-Daylesford connection? It would be helpful to many people.
Does this make Daylesford more self-contained and precious, wrapped in its necklace of hills? I don’t think so. I believe the charm inherent to the town is responsible for that – which should be treasured instead of taken advantage of.
Now an enormous development of box-like houses, with concrete gardens is planned. A cement paddock in front of each home in this place of green. I’ve seen a photo – it gives you the shivers. They’re doing the same in Melbourne – a garden will soon look like an eccentricity.
This is a kind of plunder. I’ve seen lovely old suburbs like Brunswick taken over by developers, until the very people who made the place live and glow, move to the next poorer suburb where they create a new hub, only to be followed by the developers, and the people move further out again – but the locusts always follow. Charm and developers do not mix.
Councils since times immemorial seem to delight in wrecking places. People find a friendly town; it grows through their care and their enjoyment of it. This happened in London after the Blitz. Instead of repairing beautiful, still solid old brick houses, they destroyed everything and built row upon row of insalubrious dwellings.
It is appalling and sad. Already the Rex in Vincent Street which could have been a swimming pool for the community doubled with an art centre, a library and cinema, has been standing empty and bedraggled for year in the epicentre of town.
But the council has no money. I wonder what it’s doing with taxpayers’ heavy taxes, except trying to fill an unexplainable deficit?
In spite all the expensive colourful brochures, the health and happiness of the people doesn’t seem to be the main concern of councils bent on transforming communities into ghost towns.
A genius loci, a spirit of place was handed over to us by the Aboriginals and the council proceeds to hand it over to the greed of developers.
Catherine de Saint Phalle
Dayslesford
