The tree lives on

As befits the ‘buttons and bread’ orientation of this blog, I am interested in the passing remnants of life, the small events, forgettable happenings, the things that go by unremarked or barely so. Each of our days has many such moments – passing conversations, nods to neighbours, tiny activities that keep the daily round moving, but which aren’t important in themselves. Mostly these things by their very nature just happen and we move on – no comment required. But they potentially make up so much of our lives, it seems a pity to not note them sometimes. Of course this isn’t easy – like holding water in your hands – the small slippery moments of life just slide by. And of course they are mostly not very exciting, so what would be the point of noting their passing anyway?

These thoughts caught me this week as I was going through some old bags of stuff from my spare room. I seem to find it painfully easy to keep little reminders of small daily dramas (well ‘dramas’ is overstating it for a start – more like small daily… interchanges) – notes written to me (or even from me), cards and letters, shopping lists, ticket stubs, bus tickets, receipts, bits of old newspaper lining boxes and drawers. One of these last was a sheet from The Guardian (the old Messenger newspaper delivered to us in Glenelg) for January 20 1999. It’s very yellowed now, the paper fairly brittle. The Messenger papers haven’t been around for some years – they were weekly free suburban papers published for quite a few years by News Corp. They were full of ads – that was how they made their money – but also had local stories and publicised local events. This particular set of pages include details of local courses and activities that were open for enrolment – a massage course, three or four dance academies, a radio school, opportunities to learn Korean or porcelain painting, plus the local TAFE timetable. They have a pretty substantial ‘personals’ column, under the headline ‘Encounters’ – all this business now of course online. There are just a couple of ‘news’ items – one of which is the subject of this post…

As you can see from the above article, feelings were running high in Duncan Street in January 1999. I thought I would go and visit the street and try to find out the outcome of the tale and the fate of the troublesome eucalypt.

Duncan Street runs alongside the Marion Council Offices, just off Sturt Road. At first glance it is a pretty nondescript street, with not very amazing street trees, and just regular houses and gardens. But there are violets blooming in one garden, and a flowering quince in another. In fact flowers of various kinds bloom all down the street. There is a fulsome love declaration written while the concrete was still wet – I wonder if CW and SW’s love endures? The outline of some leaves is also imprinted into the concrete. There are two largish gum trees and a few smaller ones. It looks like the survey of other residents foreshadowed in The Guardian resulted in keeping the offending tree, which, I must say, seems pretty innocuous to me. Perhaps it’s a shocker for shedding its bark in January, but it seems very sedate and ‘average’ in August. I wonder how the unnamed couple coped. I assume all these years later that they no longer live in the street, and of course I don’t know for sure which house they were in, but using the Messenger’s photo as a guide, it seems pretty clear that the tree was not removed. Hooray I say! While the residents of Duncan Street (all our streets) flit through their (our) lives, the tree has continued to watch over it all.

Here are some photos from my walk in Duncan Street 2022 (including plenty of ‘the tree’. I tried to take some from a similar angle to the original photo. you can see the same house in the background)…