North Quay

I sat watching the wake of the ferry I'd just missed massage the greasy bank. As the cars hush, hush, hushed along the freeway overhead, I idly watched a thin metal sheet fight for air as the little waves pushed it under, and under again. A little further along a car axle, bent, rusted, poked half-heartedly upward from its wheel. How the hell did that come to be down here? I imagine it falling from the suspended roadway during the clean-up of a horrible accident. Or maybe it jolted loose from a tangle of scrap on the back of truck. And what about that esky lid? It looks new. Somewhere there's a lidless esky, useless, its owner unable to bring themselves to get rid of it because, well, look at it! It's brand bloody new! And the lid's got to turn up sometime.

Under the Riverside Expressway is filthy, shabby, unattractive and unloved, but interesting for being such an unusual place to be. It's the ferry stop that brings me here this morning; it's a treat to be able to make my way across the city on the wide, arcing river. The North Quay stop is right in the city, but tucked away; a secret place. There are still a few mangroves down here, in amongst the concrete and disregard. Their aerial roots are like vast herds of exclamation marks, saying, Look! Look! A t-shirt! Look! A thong! A telephone! Plastic bags! Look! And despite the old t-shirt, and the solitary blue thong, and the huddle of discarded drink bottles, and the telephone handset all wedged in the mud of low tide, despite the pigeon shit and the Portaloos and the overflowing skip, the mangroves bring to mind what this stretch of the bank once was. The Commissariat Store is just nearby, the Treasury up the stairs just behind me. As forlorn as it now is, it's not impossible to imagine what this place was when this city was just a dusty colonial outpost.