Thirty Years From Now

My old mate Rick visited me yesterday. We're the same age, 55, having started secondary school together in 1964 at Malvern Grammar. Forty three years have gone so quickly.
"Jeez mate", said Rick, after he took a sip of the tea he made himself while I was cutting up a lump of beef and vegies for a casserole, "if we live another 30 years we'll be 85. Can you imagine that?"
Well it's hard to imagine Rick and I reaching 85, (especially when you think of all those enraged blokes giving chase and threatening they would kill us if if they caught us in the old 'egg the shaggers' days) but it's a nice thought, two old mates yarning and reflecting on life. Hopefully our minds and bodies hang in there, and in the next thirty years we can be productive and useful, maybe in ways that are not seen now. As Tom Hanks said in the movie 'Castaway', when feeling complete desolation on his return to civilization, "you never know what the the next day might bring," after years marooned on his island where his survival and eventual rescue depended on what the tide washed up.
On my morning walks lately, progress on Stage One of the Gembrook Sewage Project is interesting. There's a tracked excavator with a large auger, about 1200ml wide, visiting each property in the main street and those surrounding, and boring a neat hole about 1800ml deep, into which a black plastic tank is neatly fitted. There's a mini excavator digging trenches from the road to these tanks which are to serve as pits for effluent from each household. The plug of removed soil is carried out by the auger excavator and dropped straight into a tip truck. There are men in flouro jackets busy delivering, laying and connecting pipes and tanks and backfilling. The activity is almost feverish, continuing even when it rains; the men simply don raincoats and keep going. Remuneration must be made on numbers of units installed or connected, and not by the hour.
The sewage works began some months ago with the main pipe installed from Gembrook to Cockatoo. Traffic was restricted to one way at a time by generator driven stop/go lights at places along the main road for most of summer. If you were in a hurry or late for an appointment you could count on copping one or more redlights on the normally unrestricted country road.
When Rick and I first met, sewage had not long arrived at Mt.Waverley in Melbourne where my family lived. Prior to that we had a dunny in the back yard. The 'dunnyman' would come each week and swap the full pan with an empty one. One day we, me Jod and Meredith, at Jod's suggestion and encouragement of course, lined up at the window and 'mooned' him as he went out with the full pan propped on his shoulder.
My old friend Ida, who died a couple of years ago, told me that when she moved to Kew from Wonthaggi in the 1930's there was dunny in the back yard which backed onto a lane from which the 'cart' man would open a door and swap pans. One day Ida's mother was in such need of relief that she stayed seated while the pans were changed. But while kids might have sniggered and made up rude rhymes about the 'dunnymen', they were respected for the essential service they quietly performed with no show of resentment.
The coming of the sewage connection to Gembrook is a major indicator of progress, in case I needed reminding. We've lived here for 26 years and for the first 20 there was little change. A small supermarket was welcomed to join the pub and post office/newsagency as the prominent businesses, otherwise most of the new buildings were unseen houses tucked away outside the town on farmlets or on the edge of the bush. Puffing Billy came back some years ago and a new station was built in the middle of town. Since then things have picked up speed, accelerated by the national real estate boom. The new 'Gembrook Park Estate' in what was formerly Sam Falcone's spud paddock opposite the school, filled quickly with large modern houses, and 'The Gembrook View Estate' near us has recently gone ahead with some whoppers imposing on the view.
Also on my walk, along Quinn Rd., where we used to walk with the kids in pushers to feed grass to the Shetland ponies, there are now seven houses where there was three, and another frame standing to soon make it eight. At the top end, where I like to look each morning at the galahs, rosellas and cockatoos feeding in the paddock, and beyond into the Shephard's Creek west branch valley, a garden tap has been installed inside the fence signifying connection to the mains, and a sign on the fence bearing the owners name and the street number is prescient to trucks delivering building materials.
A 'For Sale' sign went up a couple of months ago in Bill Parker's six acre paddock on the east side of the school. Apparently it sold within a week, to a surveyor from Emerald, who no doubt has the knowledge to fully utilise this prime land zoned residential class 1. I have picked holly each Christmas for many years where this paddock joins the school boundary, so I wait, watch, and wonder if I will lose another resource.
Opposite this paddock on the south side of the main Rd. a sign on the fence advertises a planning permit application for stage 2 of the 'Gembrook Park Estate' and 28 more houses. In the local paper last week I read that VCAT approval has been given for 21 houses to be built on the five acres behind the supermarket. On the Pakenham Rd. A 'Sold' sign has gone up on board at Topp's old garden, where I've picked cammellia, beech and dogwood for many years. The current owners are friends, moving closer to Pakenham to be nearer their work and the secondary school. Before the 'For Sale' sign went up three new driveways were put in to the horse paddock at the side, indicating subdivision.
One thing is for sure, thirty years from now Gembrook will be a bigger town. When the vacant land is gone it's probable, as my friend Cherie suggested a while back, that the old houses will be knocked down, replaced by dual or triple occupancy residences. Following the increased population, more businesses will come. A chemist maybe, and a local doctor, and dentist.
If we're still here in 5-10 years when the sewage project Stage 3 reaches our street I'll be happy to be hooked up. Old septic systems are not good for the environment and ours will be nearly 35 years old, and sooner or later it will need attention. And judging by the stench of faulty systems in the town area on a bad day there are many already needing work, not to mention the dead trees in the area of Gembrook Bushland Park where sullage from the town enters.
So the sewage is a positive in a number of ways but it's always worried me where the water was going to come from for all the new houses and increased population in the future. Most of them have two or three flushing toilets, many have large spa baths, and swimming pools are increasingly popular. The Bracks state government has announced a desalination plant, one of the largest in the world, is to be built near Wonthaggi and connected to Melbourne's watersupply and northern Victoria by a new pipeline. After years of procrastination we have a postive initiative at last, despite my niggling doubt that it will actually happen.
Another cause for optimism is the interest in the environment and ecology as a result of climate change. For a couple of decades Landcare groups, made up of diverse people ranging from scientists, housewives and concerned farmers, have been planting trees in creeks and gullies, gradually repairing damaged terrain. I often see these improvements when I take a drive to places I haven't been for a while. We've had some good rain in rural areas so these and future works will prosper, thanks to those silent workers who plug away and set an example. And further, there's talk of mass planting of trees in rural areas in carbon emission trade offs, things unheard of a year or two ago.
I'm confident in thirty years time we'll be on the way to the reparation of the Australian landscape and towns and and cities will be cleaner and more efficient in their use of resources. I hope there will be similar improvement around the global village. There's also talk of bio-fuels and solar power and other sources of energy which may even reduce the economic value of oil. We may even therefore have less war. Imagine that.
Another thing for sure, I can't see houses having a dunny in the backyard, and a man changing the pan every week.