Opinion 23: Creek, Canal, Concrete, Capital

On the Incidental Monuments We Cannot Dismantle

By Isaac Laker

There is no more damning indictment of Melbourne’s credibility as a city of beauty than the postcards on offer at the tourist shops along Queen Street. Here, you will see infrastructure and social history, but not beauty. The most telling examples are: the MCG, for what it holds and the scale at which it is held, more akin to a southern megachurch than Ronchamp; Flinders Street Station, which, as a meeting place, is the nexus of Melbourne, but as architecture is most notable for the perennial myth that it was really designed for Bombay; and the less that is said about the traumatic and bizarre façade of Luna Park, the better. 

So, what should be depicted on the postcards of Melbourne? What would depict the sense of place and the history of place that is unique to the city? The answer is obvious, and I am sure you have arrived at it by now: the stretch of Moonee Ponds Creek that runs alongside the M2 through North Melbourne, of course. I would argue that monumentality, not beauty, is Melbourne’s disposition, and there is no better example of this than the 2,000-metre stretch between Flemington Bridge and Dynon Road along the Moonee Ponds Creek. It is one of the most unique spaces I have been to in the world, worthwhile for anyone visiting to understand both Melbourne’s history and the monumental architecture of the freeway. Whereas the monuments that appear on postcards—Flinders Street Station, Luna Park, the MCG—imply a blank slate onto which they were imposed, Moonee Ponds Creek along the M2 is a palimpsest: an accretion of layers of occupation that have not overridden what came before but instead recontextualised and appropriated it.

The Wurundjeri Woi-wurrung people were the traditional inhabitants of the Moonee Ponds Creek area, and lived by fishing, hunting and gathering, seasonally occupying the riverbanks in the summer months before moving into the hills for the cooler winter months. Upon the initial wave of colonisation and systemic destruction of the land, Robert Hoddle described the creek as a “chain of ponds,” stating, “This lagoon at its eastern extremity, touches upon the western bounds of the city, from whence the Williamstown railway emanates, skirting the eastern and northern margin of the lagoon flat. The Moonee Ponds have seldom any stream in the winding-bed excepting during very wet weather.” By 1890, these chain of ponds had degenerated into the Coal Canal—a logistical waterway cut specifically to deliver coal barges to North Melbourne's locomotive depot—before degenerating into an open sewer for the noxious trades that lined its banks: tanneries, abattoirs, and meat-rendering works discharging directly into what one 1890 parliamentary report described as a watercourse “covered thickly (a foot or two deep) with sewage-sludge.” By the 1950s–60s, the creek was fully concreted between Flemington and Essendon as its tributaries were systematically erased beneath suburbia's expansion, the Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works installing smooth channels optimised purely for hydraulic efficiency. A living river ecosystem had become an easement, its sole function to convey stormwater and industrial effluent as rapidly as possible toward the Yarra. This concrete channel would form the foundation for the next layer of infrastructure to come.

The M2 freeway, which runs alongside the lower length of Moonee Ponds Creek, feels thirty years older than it is. Having only opened in 1999 with the Bolte Bridge, it feels doctrinally postwar. It is remarkable how recent this infrastructure is, considering how environmentally and socially archaic it now feels—reminiscent of the infrastructures of empires: viaducts and aqueducts spanning a foreign colony. The overpass creates a highly idiosyncratic spatial condition, casting a long shadow over the residual creek running parallel, split by a pedestrian pathway. The space, while semi-enclosed from wind, rattles constantly with white noise from heavy traffic above. Below sits one of the most fascinatingly despondent pieces of public infrastructure I have ever experienced: Macaulay train station. Within this short stretch, highway, commuter rail, heavy rail, and water all vie for dominance.

Standing under the M2 overpass toward the Bolte, I feel small in a way similar to how other monumental works have made me feel. I remember feeling small in Saint-Sulpice, Paris, a cathedral the size of a city block which, unlike Notre-Dame, sits essentially empty most of the day. Within such a cavernous space constructed from heavy masonry, you feel the weight of the structure and the emptiness within. Similarly, beside the M2, there is the void generated by the freeway’s negative externalities, under which nothing grows and no one willingly inhabits. Some of the most breathtaking views I have ever seen have been of the North East Link and the West Gate Freeway duplication. These projects alone cost $38 billion—approximately 6% of Victoria's entire Gross State Product. Their open wounds generate phenomenal voids stretching to the horizon, stirring a sense of absolute omnipotence—as though no force could impede this naked dominion: ecology and society both subordinated in the creation of a freeway.

In Saint-Sulpice, I felt small in the face of God, or religion, or transcendence. In Melbourne, surrounded by spaghetti freeway infrastructure, I feel small in the face of modernity—sustained creative destruction as the engine for capital growth. While the cathedral is exceptional not just for its enormity, but also for its architecture, these freeways are exceptional purely for their bigness, inverting the paradigm of the cathedral dominating the city centre into the freeway acting as the hard edge, delimiting neighbourhood and community growth.

So if these freeways are socially and economically archaic, why do Victorian state governments seem fixated on their continued construction and expansion? This infrastructure obsession is essential to successive Victorian governments’ identity. I would contend this is due to Victoria's distinct colonial mission. Whereas Sydney, Brisbane, and Hobart were explicitly colonial penal projects, the Batman Treaty shows Melbourne being conceptualised as a project of capital speculation: initially as real estate speculation, with stolen Aboriginal land divided into lots, disregarding topography for ease of sale in the Hoddle Grid, and subsequently as extractive speculation, acting as gateway to Victoria's interior for the mid-19th century Gold Rush boom and bust. Now the Port of Melbourne sits as an awkward neighbour to the city, the largest port in Australia demanding heavy freight access to highway networks expanding into the rest of the nation—imposing freeway and heavy rail infrastructures so vast that much of central Melbourne looks bemusingly empty on a map.

The narratives around these projects always claim they are the missing link—that with this one final puzzle piece, the entire system will be unlocked, and yet it never is. Metcalfe’s law tells us that network complexity doesn't increase linearly with a new node; it increases exponentially. We know, too, that constructing another freeway induces demand, and any benefit in additional throughput dissipates within years. And it almost feels redundant to mention our climate crisis, as we sleepwalk closer to mass extinction, to which this infrastructure contributes through its materiality and the petrol-burning activities it facilitates.

These infrastructures are only superficially rational and utilitarian, and are instead deeply irrational and deleterious to our health, ecology, and state budgets—they are acts of superstition. These works are the grand projects of our late capitalist/Anthropocene/post-human era. Without religion and with a faltering economy, these projects give a sense of order and progress while asserting power over territory. In the same way the church would continue constructing a cathedral, with a new tower or choir after its ostensible completion, the freeway is a never-ending project.

The continued works on new freeways in Melbourne constitute something more than logistics, they constitute the perpetual construction of a psychosocial monument to the city's collective unconscious. Adolf Loos' famous dictum that “Only a very small part of architecture belongs to art: the tomb and the monument” seems applicable. These undertakings are as awe-inspiring for their movement and process as they are for their outcome. They are as much performance art as they are land art,  and with our climate crisis, our ever-growing freeways may serve not just as our monuments, but as our tombs.

The constant movement and expansion of Melbourne’s freeways, despite all evidence showing its futility, seems more reminiscent of Michael Heizer's City or James Turrell's Roden Crater than genuinely transformative public works. This is not incidental. The ritualistic moving, resizing, and retrofitting of these freeways is the manifestation of an essential political desire: to show change so that everything can remain the same and so low density, car dependent, suburban living can still be practiced in a city of 5 million people in the midst of climate crisis. 

The question is, what is to be done with these freeways? One hopes these performances will not go on much longer, and that the ever-increasing congestion and cost, will finally have to dictate the abandonment of this dogma. The freeway is the structure of the twentieth century, above all others. They did not exist in the nineteenth century, and much of the developed world has stopped constructing them in the twenty-first. Many have even been dismantled. I would argue that absolute disassembly of what came before perpetuates the modernist rhetoric of removal and restart and that the degradation of context to a tabula rasa, even if to ‘undo’ previous mistakes, still amounts to historical denialism. It is as though with European integration, France and Germany were to dismantle the Arc de Triomphe and Brandenburg Gate as symbols of imperial triumphalism; instead, these monuments serve as important spatial anchors, partially submerged in centuries of subsequent history.

I believe this to be the stronger argument for preserving these monuments—one that outweighs the legitimate concern for the immense embodied energy they contain and the enormous expenditure their removal would require. Rather than pursuing the utopian vision of undoing the twentieth century’s urban interventions, I propose appropriating these monuments so that, two centuries from now, future generations might see a critically interrogated spatial response to twentieth-century logistical capitalism—revealing the latent violence and illogic within.

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Citation:

Merri-bek City Council. "Local Wurundjeri History," Conversations Merry-bek, accessed October 07, 2025, https://conversations.merri-bek.vic.gov.au/renaming/local-history. 

Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works, Development of the Moonee Ponds Creek Drainage System, (Melbourne: 1981). https://www.mooneepondscreek.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/12/DEVELOPMENT-of-the-MOONEE-PONDS-CREEK-DRAINAGE-SYSTEM-1.html

Melbourne and Metropolitan Board of Works.

Adolf Loos, Spoken Into the Void: Collected Essays, 1897-1900. (United Kingdom: MIT Press, 1987).

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Image credit:

Photography by Isaac Laker

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Isaac Laker holds a BA in Philosophy and a Master of Architecture from the University of Melbourne. During his studies, he worked for Cox Architecture and studied at TU Delft on exchange. Isaac is interested in the confluence of material economy and architecture, and is currently based in Berlin where he works at Dipol.