Chain of Ponds

Chain of Ponds is a temporary artwork in Hargreaves Mall Bendigo about the Bendigo Creek Created by Aunty Marilyne Nicholls and Forest Keegel and contributed to by people at Conflux Bendigo: Creative Industries Conference and Festival and commissioned by the City of Greater Bendigo Activation Fund

Reweaving the Chain of Ponds- Aunty Marilyne and Forest Keegel have constructed the ponds from reused aluminium rods woven together with wool fibre from Bendigo Woolen Mills. They have used a traditional dilly bag stitch for making string bags, the string is created as the bag is woven, so that only a short piece of string is passed through each loop, with string being continually twined as the bag grows. They have invited people to add to the project at a workshop at Conflux because Healing Country is an act of reparation we can all engage in. Looking after our waterways is everyones business and we can all work together to prevent rubbish from ending up in the creek and care for our waterways.

Prior to European settlement Bendigo Creek was a Chain-of-Ponds watercourse. The creek was a series of seperate billabongs (swamp ponds) separated by swampy depressions where a channel was either typically absent or poorly defined. The billabongs provided clean drinking water and refuge for aquatic life in dry times and flowed as a river in times of abundant water. A sketch map, drawn by a miner William Sandbach provides an insight into the physical form of Bendigo Creek, prior to widespread disturbance associated with historic mining and colonisation. The creek was turned upside down by mining, land clearing and channelisation, Chain-of-Ponds watercourses are now quite rare in the south-east Australian landscape. The bluestone channel was built to carry away the massive amount of SLUDGE that mining created, which oozed over Djaara Country coating it in toxic waste in which nothing could grow.

“The story of mining, water and the environment in Victoria is both remarkable and sobering. The state’s rivers flowed with sludge for more than fifty years, closer to a hundred in some cases. …This was not some short-lived crisis that passed quickly once the madness of gold fever had eased. Sludge was a chronic environmental disaster…nearly all the rivers in Victoria have their headwaters in the hills where gold mining took place. Mines tipped their waste into all of them, with sludge flowing south into Port Phillip Bay and Bass Strait and north into the Murray.”

Extract from SLUDGE- Disaster on Victorias Goldfilds by Susan Lawrence & Peter Davies

Djaara are working to restore Bendigo Creek through the Wanyarram Dhelk project. Go for a walk to the frog ponds which you can access from the Bendigo Creek Trail between Knight St and Lake Weeroona

https://djadjawurrung.com.au

https://www.bendigo.vic.gov.au/Services/Strategic-Planning-Projects/Reimagining-Bendigo-Creek-Plan

This project has been supported by the City of Greater Bendigo Activation Fund