When Nature Reclaims Its Swampland: A Melbourne Flooding Story
There’s something both predictable and oddly satisfying about watching certain parts of Melbourne turn into temporary waterways during a good storm. This week, Whiteman Street near Southbank became a rather impressive creek, complete with a tram dutifully ploughing through in the background like nothing was amiss. Someone cleverly watermarked their flood photo with “Murdoch Media” which gave me a proper chuckle – though I’ll admit it took me a moment to get the pun.
The thing is, this isn’t just poor drainage or bad luck. It’s Melbourne stubbornly pretending that geography doesn’t exist. That whole Southbank area? It was wetlands and swamp. The original inhabitants knew this, obviously. They understood the land and worked with it rather than against it. Then along came colonial development in the mid-1800s, and we decided to just dump dirt from the Coode Canal into the swamp and call it “reclaimed land.” Problem solved, right?
Except nature has a long memory. Every decent storm is essentially the land saying “remember me? I’m still a floodplain, mate.” One commenter pointed out that the area was known to rise 13 metres above river level during floods. Thirteen metres! Someone brilliantly described this as “13m above hubris,” which honestly would make a fantastic title for a book about our colonial approach to urban planning.
The frustrating part is that we keep building on these flood-prone areas without properly addressing the fundamental issue. We add drainage here, raise a street there, but we’re basically trying to outsmart centuries of hydrology with some concrete and good intentions. Then we act surprised when Whiteman Street transforms into Venice during heavy rain. Someone joked about not needing to leave the state to visit Venice anymore, and while that’s funny, it’s also a bit depressing when you think about it.
The DevOps part of my brain wants to draw parallels here. It’s like building a system on fundamentally flawed architecture and then spending all your time patching problems instead of addressing the root cause. You can add monitoring, you can add redundancy, but if the foundation is wrong, you’re always going to be fighting fires. Or in this case, floods.
What really got me thinking was the comment about plastic and bark mulch from people’s gardens in the ’90s deteriorating and clogging up gutters. It’s such a small thing, but it adds up. Everyone making individual choices about their property, probably thinking they’re doing the right thing aesthetically, not realising the cumulative environmental impact decades later. It’s a microcosm of so many of our problems, really – short-term thinking without considering long-term consequences.
And can we talk about the tram? Just soldiering on through the flood like it’s a light drizzle. Someone suggested that even in an apocalypse, trams would still be running. Probably true, though they’d still be delayed. There’s something very Melbourne about that image – public infrastructure determinedly doing its job despite everything literally being underwater. Though another person pointed out that anything bigger than a shopping trolley can derail them, which is also painfully accurate.
Look, I’m not saying we should abandon Southbank and let it return to wetlands (though wouldn’t that be something?). But maybe we could be a bit more honest about what we’re dealing with. Climate change is only going to make these storms more frequent and more intense. We can’t keep pretending that 19th-century solutions are going to cut it in the 21st century.
We need proper investment in green infrastructure, better drainage systems designed for the reality of our climate future, and honestly, some serious reconsideration of where and how we develop land. Yes, it’s expensive. Yes, it requires long-term planning beyond electoral cycles. But the alternative is just accepting that parts of our city are going to regularly become impromptu waterways, with all the damage and disruption that entails.
The photo of someone walking barefoot through that floodwater made me wince. That water is definitely not clean. It’s carrying everything from storm drains, which means a delightful cocktail of street runoff, rubbish, and yes, probably sewage. Not exactly what you want between your toes.
Maybe there’s a lesson here about working with nature instead of against it. About respecting that some land just wants to be wetland, and that’s okay. About planning for the long term instead of just the next development boom. But that would require admitting that our predecessors maybe got it wrong, and that we’ve been compounding the mistake for over a century.
Until then, I suppose we’ll keep getting these reminder floods, these little messages from the landscape saying “I haven’t forgotten what I am, even if you have.” And the trams will keep running through them, late but loyal, which is very Melbourne indeed.