Marion

Leichhardt is a suburb of Sydney traditionally associated with the Italian community.  Italian restaurants, shops and cultural spaces dominate Norton Street, traditionally the main thoroughfare through the suburb.  At least I presume they do, that's what wikipedia says anyway.  Hopping off the light rail at Marion you don't actually see any of this.  Winding its way, as it does, through the backs of suburbs means that it's rare that you actually get off it anywhere immediately accessible to an urban centre.  What you get instead is Marion Street which, if you follow it long enough, will indeed connect with Norton Street and, apparently, all things Italian except the Colosseum.

At least it will if you turn left after getting off the light rail.  If you turn right you wind up in Haberfield and may God have mercy on your soul.  Immediately available from the light rail station are various houses, a sports ground and a car dealership (German cars not Italian ones).  Oh yes, and the Hawthorne Canal.  The Hawthorne Canal got a bit of a shout out in the previous light rail blog entry and it has gone from strength to strength.  Up at Lewisham West it looked like a sewer someone had forgotten to cover over.  At Taverners Hill there was enough water to prompt the presence of the occasional confused looking ibis but here at Marion it really does look like a proper canal, albeit a rather shallow one.  It's easy to see why; puncturing the stone sides are a series of entrance pipes which deliver, let's be generous and call it water to the main canal and provide a generous channel of liquid for the eye's entertainment.

It isn't really a canal in the context of a man made waterway.  It was actually a perfectly natural creek that flowed northward until it collided with the Parramatta River (and in a somewhat altered form, it still does).  European settlement leapt eagerly on this source of fresh water and it wasn't long before the thing was a stinking open sewer.  In response to this the authorities lined the creek with stone and artificial banks giving it a distinctly canal-like appearance and a new name to boot.  Why exactly lining a creek with stone was supposed to have a positive impact on all the people pissing, shitting, puking and dying in it I'm not entirely sure.

In a small park near the station there is a sign giving the history of the creek/canal and making the somewhat censorious comment that stone lining a water way had a terrible effect on biodiversity and of course such an atrocity could never occur in these enlightened times.  The diversity might have taken a serious hit but there is at least some bio still hanging around in the form of the trees lining the banks, birds nesting (or possibly just hanging out) in the bushes and, in defiance of all probability within the canal itself.  I was standing on a bridge looking at the "water" when a series of bubbles broke the surface.  Peering closer I was rewarded with the sight of an entire shoal of little fish swimming vigorously downstream, apparently blissfully unaware of the impact the stone had had on their biodiversity.  Nearby was an official looking sign that had pictures of a fish, a swimmer and a dog all with diagonal red lines through them.  Presumably fishing, swimming and dogging were all prohibited at this part of the canal.

I'm not quite sure why it was thought that Marion was a good place for a light rail station.  Again I suspect that the builders simply slotted in the stations wherever they had the space but plenty of people got off at the station along with myself and they can't all have been writing blog entries.  The one thing I have never seen is a light rail train that was empty.