AQUA LOCI: Diane Charleson

The Yarra River, the river that runs through Melbourne, Australia on its way to Port Phillip Bay, has been a constant presence all of my life. In more recent years I have moved to live in the inner North suburbs of Melbourne. One of the delights of living in this area is the easy access to the myriad of experiences provided by the parklands surrounding the confluence of the Yarra River and the Merri Creek. 

Acres of native parklands have been maintained and cultivated by local councils and residents to provide an oasis that defies its location so close to the heart of Melbourne. This area is home to the creative precinct provided by the Abbottsford Convent, a Children’s farm as well as the boat sheds and canoeing to be found at Fairfield and Studley Park amongst many more.

However, lurking beneath the surface of such beauty is a darker underbelly. An almost lost memory. This area was also home to the Yarra Bend Asylum and Cemetery. Yarra Bend was established in a curve of the river outside Melbourne. Completed in 1848, it was Victoria’s first purpose-built mental asylum.

Inmates of this asylum were buried in a nearby cemetery. Burials at the asylum in the 1870s were horrific, as a newspaper correspondent reported in a letter to the editor : 

"For some time back the bodies of patients who die in the Yarra Bend are buried by “contract”, and the contractor is in the habit of conveying the dead bodies to the cemetery in an open spring cart, without a particle of clothing except a small bit of well- worn oil-cloth. A coroner’s inquest is held on nearly every one of these bodies; this causes delay – indeed it very often happens that a body is not placed in the contractor’s cart until nearly three days have elapsed after death. The effluvia from the card is often something horrible, and to make the matter worse, the contractor is in the habit of driving along this road at the rate of about 10 miles an hour – portions of the road are rough patches of new metal etc."

My contribution to this project will be the production of video responses to this dark mysterious place. I will draw on the archive where there are newspaper reports, eye -witness accounts and poems devoted to the memory of this place. I will use this information as a starting point and also utilise found video footage of the waterways, archival photographs and some recreated footage. These images will be complemented with narrated poetry, and excerpts from newspapers and personal accounts and an appropriate soundtrack. The aim of the piece is to conjure a sense of the darkness of the place as I imagine it.

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