One crisp spring morning a group of twenty participants from the Anthropocene Campus Melbourne (ACM18) departed the Central Business District (CBD) by bus bound for CERES—the Community Environment Park, organic farm, and community hub nestled in the backstreets and by-waters of Brunswick, a vibrant urban locale in the inner north suburb of Melbourne City. Named after the ancient Roman goddess of agriculture, grain crops, fertility, and motherly relationships, the park is an inner city space that laments humans’ lost connections to the land.

CERES is your place for pressing a lemon myrtle leaf between your palms and inhaling its fragrance, for seeing white-faced heron stoop gracefully into the dam, for hearing the low hum of bees carrying their gold dust home to the hive—it’s your place for community, for building hope, for falling in love with the earth. 11CERES Community Environment Park

Today our field trip deviates from the elemental discussions of ACM18, and focuses on reestablishing new relations and resonances with place. We begin with our tour guide and bona fide ageing hippy, Ron, who takes us to the on-site EcoHouse: A fully off-grid electric, completely retrofitted Edwardian weatherboard house, which produces zero carbon emissions. The blend of passive design elements, recycled high-performance building materials, and super-contemporary technological components, interfaces with its human occupants to produce a “living” infrastructure. Sitting us down inside, Ron discusses the features of the EcoHouse: What strikes us all is the experimentation that persists at the service of best-practice design. We venture outside to the back of the building to the growing plots, and a neighbor’s cat greets us next to a vegetable patch. Wandering around the plots, Ron describes the arrangement of plants in the park. The fruit from some trees, he explains, is inedible due to soil contaminants from decades of the site’s use as a bluestone quarry, refuse dump, and landfill. The industrial history of the site, at times, snaps into place in the presence of warehouses, workshops, and office spaces in the adjacent streets. Aerial transmission towers and high-voltage cables thread immediately overhead.

Here in the back garden, dotted with compost bins, raised vegetable patches, and sunbathing felines stretching out lazily around the place, the presence of nonhuman others is evident; throughout the park, pet animals and urban wildlife live side-by-side. Platypus have been recorded recently swimming in Merri Creek after decades of absence; we assemble on the bank of the creek on the shared bicycle/footpath looking out over the spot where Ron joyfully recalls spotting them weeks before.

Our tour of the Environment Park takes in a variety of community initiatives, such as a bike shed that shares skills, parts, and knowledge with the local cycling community; the plots of community vegetable gardens that terrace the undulating hills; and a series of solar outbuildings that host various multicultural communities’ and children’s learning groups. As we pass through the park, Ron warns us to be aware of the snakes coming out of hibernation.

After a paddock-to-plate lunch at the Environment Park on-site café, we depart on a bus that shuttles us toward the middle of the CBD. Arriving at the Enterprize Park, our tour guide, Dean Stewart, is waiting to greet us. Dean is a Wemba Wemba-Wergaia man of Victoria who runs guided walks along the Yarra River, which he calls “Walkin’ Country, Walkin’ Birrarung.” Dean has more than twenty-five years’ experience creating, coordinating, and conducting cultural education, tourism, conservation, and interpretation programs in Victoria.

Enterprize Park, where we meet, is where the colonizing force led by John Batman first set foot in Victoria in 1835. Here, Dean asks us to reflect on our previously conceived notions of Aboriginality, especially in the context of the city. He reminds us of his own cultural connection to place that goes beyond percentages and phenotypes, describing himself as a “light-skinned Aboriginal” person. Such a point foregrounds the extensive excavation of Aboriginal lifeworlds that has taken place here, and the dense sedimentation of non-Aboriginal infrastructure that now weighs on the city.

Yet, the tour is speckled with constant reminders of the omnipresence of Aboriginal culture, Country, and law. Dean begins his thought-provoking tour by eliciting a number of copies of early colonist paintings, pointing out the original vantage points from which the painters depicted them. From the banks of the Yarra River, we gaze at the heritage-listed Queens Bridge, which sits on foundations bored into the rock of an ancient waterfall. The waterfall is where four distinct ecosystems meet, Dean tells us: To the east, a freshwater river, and to the west, a saltwater tributary leading to a large bay; south of the waterfall was an extensive marshland, and to the north, where Melbourne CBD is today, was a wooded hillside. Dean says that this site was the umbilical cord between two Countries, and as it was also the meeting point of distinct systems, it was here in 1835 that two distinct cultures also collided.

After ninety minutes, travelling no more than 150 meters, we walk the last fifty meters in a single snaking line, which Dean states, is how you move through Country. We walk following the footsteps of the others in front of us so that we minimize our impact and in order that we avoid disturbing other beings, such as the nonhumans we might call “game.”

Arriving at our final discussion site, still in sight of where we left off just across the river, Dean reminds us of our responsibilities to remember and unearth obscured histories in the land—in its stratigraphy, but also of its living beings. It is perhaps fitting then, that we find ourselves sitting at the boundary of a manicured garden brimming with endemic flora; fitting that we should conclude here, at a conundrum of sorts.

This is a private garden for the exclusive use of employees of one of the world’s largest petrochemical companies, the headquarters of which are in the building behind it. The garden contains some of the Melbourne region’s most notable examples of native flora, and as a result, it attracts birds not seen on Country for a number of decades. Teasingly, says Dean smiling ironically, we are not permitted to enter.